Labor of love: The formalization of care in transgender kinship organizations

Abstract

While prior research shows how community-based organizations (CBO’s) create new social ties and solidarities, we know less about CBO’s that formalize preexisting relationships of care. Analyzing transgender nonprofits as a strategic case, this article develops the concept of kinship organizations: organizations that incorporate norms, networks, and resources from kinship systems into a formal organization that provides regular social services. Drawing on 7 months of ethnography and 36 formal interviews with staff and clients, I explore how transgender kinship organizations function, develop, and impact broader transgender community. Kinship organizations are highly responsive to crisis, are able to leverage personal and organizational resources, and are therefore capable of providing personalized rapid-response care to very precarious transgender people. On the other hand, subsuming kinship within a nonprofit transforms relationships of mutual care into unidirectional service relationships and relationships of chosen family into work-based hierarchies. This account of kinship organizations contributes to the theory on organizational development and provides new conceptual tools for analyzing boundaries between organizations and communities.

Kinship and the politics of responsibility: An introduction

“…For example, social movements often utilize kinship idioms and appeal to kinship-inspired moralities to mobilize and form relationships across divides, in order to constitute community from unexpected sources and in different spaces. Examples range from veterans in Oman creating counterhegemonic solidarities (Wilson, 2020) to transgender kinship NGOs in the USA (Greene, 2021), as well as more traditional kinship discourses as they are lived in diasporic, working-class, political and religious communities (Wekker, 2006).…”

“…In fact, our focus on kinship allows for a processual and relational understanding of gendered experiences, one that emphasizes the multiple ways that caring for others, for example, may be the main way in which gender becomes relevant to struggles over reproductive justice that challenge hegemonic discourses on families. It is frequently through care that struggles over the redistribution of resources and social justice are expressed with reference to kinship terms and relations (Arruzza et al, 2019;Greene, 2021;Weston, 1997Weston, [1991). 3.…”

Order and openness in community-driven urban initiatives: Insights from a ‘spot-fix’

“…For example, the organisation of co-working spaces was influenced by the way actors related to organisations in the external environment such as firms, urban planners, and political agencies (Blagoev et al, 2019). The activities of self-help groups and kinship-based initiatives were influenced by more formal entities such as non-governmental organisations (Greene, 2021). Certain linking organisations have helped community efforts to define aims, regulate adherence, ensure legitimacy and manage ambiguity (Heinze et al, 2016).…”