Does love make a family? The politics and micro-politics of filiation among same-sex families

Abstract

This article explores how the institutional treatment of new family configurations weaves into patterns of everyday life, framing intimacy and family organisation. through the study of homoparental family configurations in the italian context, i will analyse the impact, on family configurations, of the gap between the juridical translation of filiation ties and the everyday exercise of parenting. t h e ethnographic gaze will illustrate parental and institutional efforts to make or unmake kinship ties which are neither "biogenetic" nor legally recognised. In this way, I will address how kin relations are constructed, deconstructed and defined by different actors, including children. This will provide some theoretical reflections on the "nature" of kinship and filiation, which must be resituated in its social and historical condition of possibility and in a "moral economy of filiation".