Queer Kinships : Resisting Erasure, Queering Relation in Contemporary France

Queer Kinships explores how queer individuals and communities in France resist erasure and reimagine belonging through inventive practices of kinship.

Queer Kinships explores how queer individuals and communities in France resist erasure and reimagine belonging through inventive practices of kinship. Moving beyond the limited binaries of communitarianism and universalism, the book traces how French queers cultivate relational solidarities across linguistic, digital, and activist spaces. Through detailed analyses of conferences, podcasts, digital activism, and the Collages Féminicides movement, CJ Gomolka introduces the concepts of nomenclatural, techno, and interpellative kinships as frameworks for understanding new forms of affiliation that emerge under conditions of censorship, discrimination, violence, and death. The book demonstrates how queers forge bonds across difference that challenge Republican assimilationist models while also resisting Anglo-American universalizing notions of queer identity. By situating these practices within France’s longer histories of colonialism, universalism, and state-managed erasure, Queer Kinships illuminates the radical potential of kinship as both a reparative practice and a speculative horizon. It will be essential reading for scholars of queer theory, French and Francophone studies, gender studies, and anyone interested in how kinship offers tools for survival, resistance, and coalition-building in precarious times.