Paper short abstract:

Queer parents in Russia have to navigate the tension between disclosing and documenting their families, and concealing their family structure for the safety of their children. I explore how queer families do display work in various medical settings in an authoritarian and queerphobic context.

Paper long abstract:

In the past decade, Russia has become an increasingly hostile place for its LGBTQ+ citizens, as Putin’s war on queerness continues. Parents are particularly vulnerable to Russia’s anti-queer legislation, as they constantly risk their children being relinquished by the state for ‘propagating non-traditional sexual relations to minors’ as per the ‘anti-LGBTQ propaganda’ law of 2013. Yet, queer families continue to have and raise children: adopt, access assisted reproduction and surrogacy, and come together to co-parent. This paper is part of an anthropological study of Russian LGBTQ+ parents and their families, which follows 25 families from across the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

In this paper, I explore how parents navigate displaying and documenting their families in the healthcare context: assisted reproduction clinics, surrogacy agencies, prenatal care and obstetrics, labour and delivery, and paediatric care. As healthcare bureaucracy is abundant in Russia, I want to focus on the tensions between documenting the family structure, advocating for equal treatment, and the desire to stay hidden for safety reasons. I will argue that queer families fight hard to display a version of their family; simultaneously resisting the hegemonic hetero-patriarchal ideas of who qualifies as parents, and concealing some parts of the family that might be too unconventional for the given institutional site. I seek to explore which strategies they choose to document, authenticate and legitimise their parental status while simultaneously presenting a carefully crafted family narrative.