Longing for family: Transnationally mobile Asian queer young women and the affective work of mobile family-making

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14: Sexual and Gender Minority Families

Abstract

Across youth mobilities and queer migration scholarship, movement is often narrated as departure: leaving the parental home as a developmental milestone and leaving heteronormative environments to cultivate livable queer selves. While analytically productive, this optic of leaving can obscure a parallel dynamic that is central to many mobile young people’s lives: mobility does not necessarily loosen kinship claims, but reconfigures how “family” is felt, negotiated, and made possible across distance. Drawing on in-depth interviews with young women from a five-year longitudinal study of transnationally mobile youth moving in and out of Australia and on a qualitative interview project with 20 Chinese queer female international students in Australia, this extended abstract theorizes “longing for family” as a gendered, racialized, and mobility-shaped form of affective kin work. Participants describe mobility as enabling experimentation in intimacy and opening new horizons for queer futures (including imagined and material possibilities for assisted reproductive technologies), yet they simultaneously articulate strong desires for connection, recognition, and support from both their own families of origin and their partners’ families. Preliminary analysis suggests that longing is not reducible to nostalgia or a desire to return to heteronormative family arrangements. Rather, longing organizes ongoing labor—disclosure and concealment, conflict management, moral accounting, and care—that aims to sustain relational belonging while refusing normative expectations around daughterhood, marriage, and reproduction. By centering transnationally mobile Asian queer young women, this paper contributes to the sociology of gender and family by (a) conceptualizing longing as an affective mechanism through which gendered family responsibilities are reproduced and contested across borders, (b) extending queer kinship analysis beyond “chosen family” frameworks to include the enduring centrality of families of origin and partners’ kin, and (c) demonstrating how race and migration stratification shape the conditions under which queer family futures become imaginable and pursue-able.

Authors

• Hao Zheng, Curtin University

• Anita Harris, Deakin University

• Loretta Baldassar, Edith Cowan University