From “gay-marriages” to “queer-kinship”: dynamics of a research interest towards LGBT- and queer-families in 1963–2024

In the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first century, the expansion of legal recognition of same-sex partnerships and the redefinition of marriage as a gender-neutral institution were accompanied by a rapid growth of scholarly literature on LGBT and queer families. However, the idea of a simple exponential increase in this literature is overly reductive. This article conceptualizes publication dynamics as the outcome of an interaction between the internal accumulation of literature, political and legislative stimuli, institutional context, and terminological change. The analysis covers annual counts of English-language publications—based on 26 keywords grouped into six thematic clusters—in Google Scholar and PubMed for 1963–2024. These counts were examined in relation to the accumulated body of previous publications, the annual number of political and legislative initiatives concerning same-sex couples in 105 countries, the averaged ILGA-Europe Rainbow Index, and nonlinear temporal dynamics. The conceptual framework is based on a modified version of F. Bass’s model of innovation diffusion. The dynamics of scholarly attention to LGBT and queer families are clearly nonlinear. A long period of low publication activity before the 1990s was followed by acceleration in the 2000s, peaks in the 2010s, and subsequent deceleration for some terms. Generalized additive models confirmed the significance of wave-like publication dynamics. The strongest thematic wave concerned marriage; over time, however, scholarly attention shifted toward family, parenthood, kinship, queer family formations, and transgender issues. The internal accumulation of literature is one of the key predictors of the volume of new publications. Political and legislative initiatives often precede increases in publication activity by one or two years, with restrictive initiatives producing a stronger response than initiatives aimed at recognition. Institutional context is also associated with the frequency of legal and queer terminology. The modified innovation-diffusion model is applicable to the analysis of keyword dynamics in scholarly publications, provided that external stimuli and lexical shifts are taken into account. For Ukraine, the findings have also heuristic value: the local discussion appears to follow a similar but delayed trajectory, moving from human rights and anti-discrimination frames toward partnership, family, children, care, inheritance, wartime vulnerability, and legal recognition.