Paper short abstract:

How do members of an ecumenical LGBTQIA+ congregation in the Philippines conceptualise their relationships with both biological family and social family made up of friends and fellow churchgoers? How does the author simultaneously navigate between dual identities of kin and researcher?

Paper long abstract:

Since its conception, queer studies has been a burgeoning field through which friendship as a form of social kinship is elevated as a valuable and fruitful resource. The significance placed on ‘found’ or ‘chosen families' as focal networks of care amongst LGBTQIA+ people across various cultural contexts not only exemplifies the mutability of kinship as an interpersonal connection but also disputes heteropatriarchal norms that frame biological kin and the nuclear family as inherently superior to friends and other social relations. However, much of this research – particularly that conducted in the Global North – tends to characterise the formation of these social kin as the result of LGBTQIA+ people’s estrangement from their biological relations or as a response to adversity more generally, be it homophobia, racism, poverty, or indeed all of the above. In response, this paper explores a chosen family formed under mutually held missions of socially progressive religiosity and politics, following members of an ecumenical LGBTQIA+ affirming Christian church based in Metro Manila. Drawing on my doctoral research conducted in the Philippines from 2022 to 2023, I discuss how congregants conceptualised and cultivated relationships with both their biological families and their chosen family from the church, spheres that were differentiated between yet existed comfortably side-by-side without hierarchy. I also reflect autoethnographically on how I navigated between my dual identities as both kin and researcher, having been folded into the church as a member of the congregation myself months before selecting the chapel as my thesis fieldsite.