Close Relations

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

   PDF

2. Close Relations and Boundary Work: Family, Kinship and Beyond

   • Helena Wahlström Henriksson, Klara Goedecke

   Pages 1-17

3. Correction to: Childless Women’s Relationships with Children of Others: Narratives from Two Generations in Lithuania

   • Lina Šumskaitė, Margarita Gedvilaitė-Kordušienė

   Pages C1-C1

4. Conceptualizing Close Relations

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

      PDF

   2. Querying Lesbian Fatherhood

      • Amalia Ziv

      Pages 21-36

   3. Gay and Lesbian Collaborative Co-parenting: Recognising Multiple Parents in the Netherlands and the UK

      • Philip D. Bremner

      Pages 37-51

   4. Forgetting Gender While Desexualising Friendship? Heteronormativity and Everyday Practices of Cross-Gender Friendship Among Adults in Germany

      • Leoni Linek

      Pages 53-68

   5. The Search for Self: Adoption Reunions, Kinship Matters and Donor Conception

      • Gary Clapton

      Pages 69-84

5. Negotiating Trans/National Kinship

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 85-85

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   2. Narrative Kinning in Contemporary Memoirs of Korean Adoption

      • Lena Ahlin

      Pages 87-101

   3. The Power of Ordinary Things: How Parents’ Support of Refugees Shape Mothering and New Forms of Kinning

      • Jenny Lönnroth

      Pages 103-119

   4. ‘My Mother Laughs, but She Never Smiles’: Children, Mothers, and Migration in Contemporary Swedish Literature and Life Writing

      • Anna Williams

      Pages 121-136

6. Theorizing Parenting Practices and Parent-Child Relations

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 137-137

      PDF

   2. Polyamorous Parenthood: Kinship, Gender and Morality

      • Catrine Andersson, Charlotta Carlström

      Pages 139-153

   3. Cultivate and Constrain: Swedish Middle-Class Parents Negotiate Ideals About Children’s Emotions and Parents’ Responses to Them

      • Anna Malmquist, Lisa Wiklander, Asta Cekaite

      Pages 155-170

   4. Childless Women’s Relationships with Children of Others: Narratives from Two Generations in Lithuania

      • Lina Šumskaitė, Margarita Gedvilaitė-Kordušienė

      Pages 171-192Open Access

   5. ‘Mums Are Mums’. Negotiations of Parenthood Ideals Among Swedish Mothers with ADHD

      • Kitty Lassinantti, Anna-Lena Almqvist

      Pages 193-208

   6. Morphing Together: Motherhood, Old Grievances, and Corporeal Materiality in Deborah Levy’s Hot milk

      • Gabriele Griffin

      Pages 209-220

This book speaks to the meanings and values that inhere in close relations, focusing on ‘family’ and ‘kinship’ but also looking beyond these categories. Multifaceted, diverse and subject to constant debate, close relations are ubiquitous in human lives on embodied as well as symbolic levels. Closely related to processes of power, legibility and recognition, close relations are surrounded by boundaries that both constrain and enable their practical, symbolical and legal formation. Carefully contextualising close relations in relation to different national contexts, but also in relation to gender, sexuality, race, religion and dis/ability, the volume points to the importance of and variations in how close relations are lived, understood and negotiated.


Grounded in a number of academic areas and disciplines, ranging from legal studies, sociology and social work to literary studies and ethnology, this volume also highlights the value of using inter- and multidisciplinary scholarly approaches in research about close relations.



Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

• close relations
• collaborative co-parenting
• non-biological parenthood
• queer kinship
• lesbian fatherhood
• lesbian families
• heteronormativity and friendship
• narrative kinning
• adoption reunions and kinship
• transracial adoption
• adoptee identity
• migration and motherhood
• motherhood ideology
• motherhood and ADHD
• female masculinity

• Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

  Helena Wahlström Henriksson

• Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

  Klara Goedecke

Helena Wahlström Henriksson is Professor of Gender studies and Associate Professor in American literature at Uppsala University. Her research interests are feminist cultural studies, masculinity studies, and critical kinship studies. She has published widely on fatherhood, mother-child relations and orphanhood. She coordinated the Swedish Network for Family and Kinship Studies (2014-2019), and its international conference Close Relations (2018). Her current project, “Single Parents in Swedish Media” investigates conteporary representations of “lone” parenthood in life writing, film, and newspapers.


Klara Goedecke is a postdoc at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focuses on men and masculinities from intersectional perspectives, and includes work on homosociality, men’s friendships, postfeminism and gender equality. Her current project, “High stakes. Men, masculinities and gambling as cultural phenomena,” investigates gender constructions, affectsand class politics in Swedish gambling.

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