Nebeling Petersen, Michael, and Lene Myong. ‘(Un)Liveabilities: Homonationalism and Transnational Adoption’. (2015)

Nebeling Petersen, Michael, and Lene Myong. ‘(Un)Liveabilities: Homonationalism and Transnational Adoption’. Sexualities, vol. 18, no. 3, SAGE Publications Ltd, Mar. 2015, pp. 329–345.

Rosa Morena tells a story about kinship in which a white homosexual Danish man adopts a child born to a black poor Brazilian woman. Using a theoretical framework of biopolitics and affective labour the article highlights how the male homosexual figure is being cast as heteronormative and white in order to become intelligible as a parent and the bearer of liveable kinship. The casting rests on the affective and reproductive labour of the birth mother who is portrayed as an unsuitable parent through a colonial discourse steeped in sexualized and racialized imagery. A specific distribution of affect fixates and relegates the birth mother to a state of living dead, and thus she becomes the bearer of an unliveable kinship.

doi:10.1177/1363460714544809.

https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460714544809.