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Complicating Kinship and Inheritance: Older Lesbians’ and Gay Men’s Will-Writing in England

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Abstract

This article complicates the idea that lesbian and gay kinship is based primarily on friendship, voluntarism and being free from duty and obligation. It also offers a more nuanced understanding of wills as a rich source of evidence for making claims about kinship, family and relationships. It analyses conversations about will-writing with fifteen older lesbians and gay men, taken from interviews which formed part of a wider socio-legal study on the intersection of ageing, gender and sexuality (Westwood in Ageing, Gender and Sexuality: equality in later life. PhD thesis, School of Law, University of Keele, UK, 2015). The analysis identifies a wide range of kinship formations and composition going beyond “family of choice” narratives, and also both connections and disconnections between ties of love and affection and disposal of assets in wills. Participants’ will-writing reflected four types of prioritisation: prioritising children; prioritising friends; prioritising siblings; mixed priorities. In contrast with accounts of “families of choice” as being duty-free, a sense of duty, especially towards biological family members, was evident in a number of interviews. I suggest that wills can sometimes be a rich source of evidence about kinship, but only when analysis takes into account the complexities and contingencies which can be involved.

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Notes

  1. The privileging of heterosexual relationships in the context of heteronormativity, which is the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm.

  2. Individuals are under no formal duty to pass property down through biological family (Kerridge 2011).

  3. All names are pseudonyms.

  4. Interviews were conducted prior to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, in England and Wales, and the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014.

  5. If These Walls Could Talk 2 is a 2000 film which follows three separate storylines about lesbian couples in three different eras: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206036/.

  6. Instrumental support refers to support which is practical and/or enabling. See Semmer et al. (2008).

  7. I use the term ‘childfree’ rather than ‘childless’ in order to avoid colluding with notions of non-parenthood as a deficit identity and “a discrediting attribute” (Rich et al. 2011, 236).

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Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks go to the anonymous reviewers and editors for extensive feedback on an earlier draft of this article, and to Ruth Fletcher and Rosie Harding for their excellent supervision of my Ph.D. research.

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  1. Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender (CRAG), University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK

    Sue Westwood

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  1. Sue Westwood
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Correspondence to Sue Westwood.

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Westwood, S. Complicating Kinship and Inheritance: Older Lesbians’ and Gay Men’s Will-Writing in England. Fem Leg Stud 23, 181–197 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-015-9287-3

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