“We’ve already gotten married!” We are a family, our dogs are like our children…” is how Aakriti* answers, ever so tellingly, when asked if marriage is in store for her. She and her companion Anwesha have been married for eight years. When Article 377 was decriminalized in 2018, many people, including Akriti, questioned the issue of marriage. Marriage is still not on the cards four years after same-sex couples like Akriti and her boyfriend were granted legal recognition.
For one thing, despite the legalization of same-sex partnerships, non-heterosexual marriages are still illegal in India. Nonetheless, the notional decriminalization of same-sex relationships has fueled the development of new types of acceptable familial patterns.
Aakriti and other LGBTQIA people have forced a cultural rethinking of family and marriage as both ideals and structures. Same-sex partnerships have not only deconstructed the traditional portrayal of these institutions under the eyes of a patriarchal, heteronormative worldview, but have also artistically reimagined them.
To further understand how same-sex partnerships fit into these social structures, it is necessary to first define what a family is. While sociologists and anthropologists have long tried to define family, most define it as a “unit” or “association” of adults and their progeny.
More conservative definitions of family have imagined it through a heterosexual lens, with Eliott and Merrill stating that “Family is the biological social unit composed of husband, wife, and children,” Ogburn and Nimkoff stating that “Family is a more or less durable association of husband and wife with or without children or of a man or woman alone, with children,” and Kingsley Davis defining it as “Family is a group of persons,
However, as we begin to reimagine the institution of family, we turn to Kath Weston’s Families We Choose (1993), in which she used fieldwork in the United States to investigate how gay men and lesbians have begun to construct their own notions of kinship based on the symbolism of love, choice, identity, and friendship as the binding features of a family, as opposed to blood relations that characterize heteronormative familial ties.
According to Weston, “love builds a family, nothing more, nothing less.” Love has grown to symbolize a symbol of both identification and togetherness for LGBT people, becoming both a necessary and sufficient condition for establishing family relationships. As Aakriti puts out, ‘blood ties are scarcely a prerequisite for having profound connections; my relationship with my spouse is founded on a lot more. It is about mutual appreciation, acceptance, and the decision to love one other in good times and bad. Because of the way we spend our lives together, she has become my family. Creating this family with each other, if anything, has made us realize what we were missing in our original families!”
Essentially, what emerges as a distinguishing trait of kinship here is the factor of Choice. The ‘families we pick’ have added innovative characteristics into kinship networks by allowing individuals to choose who belongs to their family. Traditional kinship relationships are frequently founded on an egocentric perspective, in which a family tree is drawn out from the head of the family, who is typically male in most circumstances. To that extent, queer families are frequently formed and function in a more equal manner.