NEUROBIOLOGY AND THE QUEERNESS OF KINSHIP 115Queer Ties and the Embodiment of Kinship
Social neuroscience is making a strong case for the relevance of intercor-
poreality and affect in attachment and kinship. Much of this work, unfor-
tunately, adheres to the “traditionally constructed linear equation of sexual
reproduction” (Hird 2004, 222), where heterosexual coitus leads almost
inevitably to pair attachment, pregnancy, and maternal bonding. To the
extent that social neuroscientists rely on this model, they cannot even begin
to address everyone’s experiences of attachment and kinship. The model
poorly explains the appearance of other kinds of attachments in scientific
research — paternal, alloparental, and same- sex bonds, to begin with — and
fails to consider how nonreproductive, nonheterosexual, or otherwise
queer kinships in human lives are biologically enabled. Even kinship struc-
tures that do fit more or less neatly into a reproductive equation — such as
mother- infant nursing dyads — cannot be adequately described in universal
and essentialist terms. Affective ties are experiential and, in human con-
texts at least, situated in cultural and historical circumstances, including
relations of exploitation and domination. A reductionist approach leads to
erasure of this specificity, to the bracketing of context, and to ignorance of
the effects of discursive, economic, and political structures on embodied
relations. If social neuroscience is getting kinship wrong, then, it is not
because it looks to the biological body. Rather, it is (in part) that its under-
standing of the body is constrained by heteronormative logic, a logic that
does not merely exclude some bodies in favor of others, but obscures the
complexity of the experience it is trying to explain for all bodies.
The erasure of queer experience, however, has particularly violent
effects for people whose bonds are deemed to disappoint nature. Butler
(2004) argues that kinships not only depend on, but are also constituted by,
social recognition, which is conferred only on certain classes of relations,
most ideally, heterosexual, two- parent families. As Butler notes, being rec-
ognized as legitimate kin means that “everyone must let you into the door
of the hospital; everyone must honor your claim to grief; everyone will
assume your natural rights to a child; everyone will regard your relation-
ship as elevated into eternity” (111). The lack of social recognition of queer
kinship bonds threatens them, as when “the sense of delegitimation can
make it harder to sustain a bond, a bond that is not real anyway, a bond that