Constructing Homonormative Kinship: The Life Worlds and Death Worlds of Gay and Lesbian Adoption in Canada

ABSTRACT:In this essay, I analyze Conceiving Family, a documentary film produced by Amy Bohigian in 2011 about gay and lesbian adoptions in Canada. I argue that this film illustrates how gay and lesbian adoption can be understood to be implicated in hetero- and homonormativity and thus in the naturalization of racial and global inequities, as well as in settler colonialism in Canada. I suggest that the film can be read as a demonstration of how the normative Canadian family is realized in opposition to racialized families, Indigenous families, nonmonogamous family formations, and queer families.