In many cultures, kinship and sexuality are perceived as intimately interconnected issues and dominant sexual moralities often frame heterosexual relations within the union of marriage as the only ‘natural’ basis for family formation. Breaches of these moral expectations through premarital, extramarital, or lesbian/gay sexual relations are often heavily sanctioned.

Conventional cultural perceptions of the linkages between kinship and sexuality are, however, challenged in multiple ways in the contemporary world. New technologies for assisted reproduction de-link sexuality from parenthood, sowing cultural doubts about what mother- and fatherhood mean and bringing into question whether sex is always the ‘natural’ basis for family formation. In the case of surrogacy, for instance, is the ‘real’ mother the woman gestating the child or the woman providing the egg and thus the child’s genetic make-up? In case of in-vitro fertilisation with donor sperm, is the father the man who provided the sperm or the man who brings up the child? The advent of gay and lesbian families also contributes to questioning conventional ideas about kinship: these new ways of forming families suggest that kinship may be constituted in ways other than through biological relations.

This module examines relations between kinship and sexuality, exploring particularly how social and technological challenges to conventional family arrangements may confront dominant ethics of sexual propriety in different ways across different cultures.

Attachment	Size	Type
Kinship Outline for Participants	46.49 KB	PDF
Kinship Facilitator Notes	231.07 KB	PDF
Kinship Powerpoint Slides	1.23 MB	Powerpoint file