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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 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.