Theorizing Queer Kinship and the Normative Family in the Canadian Sponsorship of Syrian Refugees

Abstract

Canada’s refugee sponsorship initiative gained international attention following the federal government’s 2015 plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada through a combination of government and private sponsorship. The paper draws on media coverage of Syrian refugee sponsorship to examine how discourses around family and kinship in Canada’s sponsorship program risk constraining the pre- and post-resettlement lives of Syrian refugees. Beyond the humanitarian lens, the paper draws on human-interest stories to identify the ruptures and emergences in the language of kinship at play in broader narratives and structures impacting Syrian refugees. Using critiques of heteronormativity emergent in feminist and queer geography, the paper asks how kinship and family are deployed, contested, and shaped in discourses around refugee sponsorship. Juxtaposing the normalization of “family” in tension with non-nuclear forms of kinship, such as extended kin networks and polygamous families, this work draws on queer theories of kinship to question how gender, sexuality, and familial structures are imagined and reconfigured by governments, refugees, and sponsors in the context of resettlement.