Challenging Norms, Pluralizing Worlds: Global Dialogues on Non-Monogamous and Queer Kinships

Dear Colleagues,

Context and Central Problem:
In recent decades, scholarship on intimacy, sexuality, family, and kinship has persistently challenged cis-heteronormative and monogamous frameworks. Both non-monogamy studies and queer studies offer vital tools for understanding how people build relational worlds beyond the limits of monogamous and cis-heterosexual norms, generating new vocabularies, practices, and forms of belonging. However, the conceptual and political intersections between them remain under-theorized.

While there is a growing and expanding dialogue between the fields of research into non-monogamy and queer kinship and intimacy, several significant gaps remain. This dialogue tends to neglect the consideration of class, race and ethnicity, ignoring the intimate practices and experiences of the lower socio-economic classes.  Moreover, it often adopts a strong Global North bias, rendering non-Western kinship formations, including those grouped under the broad generic category of “polygamy”, largely absent from these conversations.

A critical shortcoming is the lack of a deep understanding of the geopolitics of the norms that reinforce situationally or contextually conventional models of kinship (such as the monogamous nuclear family in the Global North) and the practices that reinforce, transform, and/or subvert them. Much of the existing academic literature, primarily written in English, reproduces Anglo-European perspectives, implicitly treating their social and sexual regulations as universal phenomena. This Special Issue will move beyond this Anglophone and Eurocentric view, inviting contributions from within a decolonial perspective.

Objectives and Approach:
This Special Issue will fill these gaps by promoting a transnational and transdisciplinary dialogue. It will explore how non-monogamies and queer kinship both maintain and reconfigure intimacy, care, and reproduction, giving them new forms and meanings. It will also investigate how they are, in turn, shaped by distinct racial, economic, legal, and geopolitical conditions.

We are particularly interested in contributions that foreground geopolitical diversity and multiple epistemologies, advancing a transnational and decolonial conversation on queer and non-monogamous ways of living, caring, and world-making. Likewise, we are interested in research that challenges facile dichotomies, even when they invert the hegemonic status quo—we welcome contributions that sit with the ambiguities arising from the commodification of intimate citizenship and of care and kinship.

Our goal is to amplify the ethnic, economic, religious, epistemic and racial diversity of the discussion in this field. We encourage contributions from scholars situated in, or focusing on, contexts beyond dominant academic centres, including, but not limited to, the Global South, Indigenous communities, and migrant diasporas, as well as those who incorporate an intersectional approach to relating and who think through the non-human/human connections of queer ecologies and the embodied materiality of kinship.

Themes and Lines of Inquiry:
We invite contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How are non-monogamous and queer kinship formations understood, experienced, and regulated across different contexts?
• How do the intersecting forces of race, class, colonialism, and political culture enable and constrain the possibilities for these relational forms?
• In what ways do state biopolitical policies shape the material realities, legal recognition, and lived meanings of these kinships?
• How can a critical focus on non-Western and Indigenous kinship practices challenge and enrich the theoretical vocabularies of both queer and non-monogamy studies?
• What are the implications of hegemonizing Global North understandings of diversity or queer regarding Othered communities and epistemologies?
• What methodological and ethical innovations can enrich the study of these kinships from a decolonial perspective?

We invite the submission of articles, short essays, debates and other formats that address these themes from diverse disciplinary perspectives.

Dr. Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli
Dr. Leehee Rothschild
Dr. Antonio Cerdeira Pilão
Dr. Daniel Cardoso
Dr. Christian Klesse
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• queer kinship
• non-monogamy
• decolonial perspectives
• transnational intimacy
• intersectionality
• alternative family formations