NEUROBIOLOGY AND THE QUEERNESS OF KINSHIP 99Weston’s (1991) ethnography, Families We Choose. If kinship is a social
construction, it can be rescripted to enable new social, cultural, and legal
arrangements that respect and foster alternative ideas of family, particu-
larly those that do not depend on biological relatedness. Alternatively, post-
structuralist theory teaches that such scripts are not the result of choice,
but rather historicity and power relations; for this reason Butler (2004)
proposes we might do better without kinship at all. For Weston’s research
subjects, kinship is a set of rules that can be rewritten, whereas for Butler
it is rooted in discourse that is “always already heterosexual” (102). Either
way, kinship is understood as wholly representational, not natural but cul-
tural, not material but discursive. (The loss or denial of kinship, then, is
primarily a loss of rights, recognition, or cultural legibility.)
I want to pursue a different line of thinking. Queer forms of kinship
challenge the heteronormative order not because they overcome, or have
nothing to do with, nature or biology. Rather, they demonstrate the reality
of felt, affective bonds that do not follow heteronormative and reproduc-
tive patterns. They show, as David Eng puts it, that “the feeling of kinship
belongs to everyone” (2010, 198). Eng’s work describes affective kinships as
deeply felt, embodied ties that are experienced in all sorts of kin relations
that transcend biogenetic models of family, including queer and trans-
national ones. Are such bonds — whether “chosen” or not — embodied and
entangled with biological being? Can the body’s contributions to affective
kinships be acknowledged outside of heteronormative assumptions? How
might a feminist and queer critique of kinship recognize not only culture’s
capacity to be heteronormative but also nature’s capacity to be queer? The
problem is not simply to rehabilitate kinship as less heteronormative, but
rather to rethink what it is to be biologically related to another.
Social neuroscientists offer accounts of kinship that are embodied, felt,
biological, and intercorporeal, and also in many cases relentlessly hetero-
normative. Drawing on animal research, neuroendocrinology, evolution-
ary biology, and experimental psychology, among other fields, they trace
what they see as the bonds of kinship, or “attachment,” to their brain pro-
cesses and structures, with special attention to the oxytocin and vasopres-
sin systems. In this chapter I give an account of attachment research as it
is being practiced in social neuroscience. I focus on the role of oxytocin in
pair bonding, monogamy, and the theory of brain maternalization. This