Queer Bereavement, Relational Legitimacy, and Disenfranchised Grief: A Critical Narrative Review of Partner Loss in Sexual and Gender Minority Populations

The available evidence on partner bereavement in LGBTIQ+ populations, which is predominantly based on lesbian, gay, and bisexual participants in Western settings, suggests that such bereavement cannot be understood solely as an individual response to death, but must also be analyzed in relation to relational legitimacy, visibility, recognition, and access to support. This article presents a critical narrative review of the literature on grief and bereavement following the death of a partner across LGBTIQ+ populations, while recognizing that the underlying evidence is concentrated in lesbian, gay, and bisexual participants, same-sex partnerships, and Western or Anglophone contexts. In this review, queer bereavement is used as a critical interpretive category referring to bereavement experiences shaped by heteronormative and cisnormative structures, whereas the terminology used for individual studies reflects the specific populations and relationship configurations represented in each source. Rather than treating partner bereavement as a simple identity-based variation in a universal process, the review argues that it is shaped by the interaction of heteronormative social norms, institutional recognition, visibility management, kinship arrangements, and structural inequalities. The analysis identifies minority stress, disenfranchised grief, relational legitimacy, and chosen family as the field’s main conceptual axes. Taken together, the reviewed findings suggest that what is unequally distributed is not only the affective burden of loss, but also the social conditions that allow the relationship to be named, validated, and publicly sustained after death. The review also highlights important limitations in the available evidence, particularly its concentration in Anglophone, Western, and relatively visible populations, which underscores the need for more intersectional and contextually diverse research.