Kinship and care in precarious networks: care and carelessness in contemporary queer kinship networks in the UK

This paper examines how precarious queer kinship practices create spaces of care (Bartos Citation2019; Raghuram Citation2016) while simultaneously reproducing uneven power relations and ambivalent outcomes along intersectional lines. Rather than treating care as inherently ethical or redistributive, the article troubles care by asking how it is produced, foregrounding questions of whiteness, caring agencies and uneven distribution of care. Drawing on an arts-based participatory methodology, the research works with a queer feminist poetry group in South-East England, whose members included migrants and people born in the UK to migrant parents. The analysis shows that non-normative kinship can create meaningful forms of care, while care remains unevenly distributed through intersectional inequalities. Rather than resolving these inequalities, caring practices are continually negotiated and adapted in response to precarity, competing needs and unequal capacities. This paper contributes to feminist and queer geographies of care by highlighting care as a relational, contested and situational practice rather than a stable form of support.