Dancing Our Own Steps: A Queer Families’ Project— Kath Reid

This paper focuses on the key narrative practices that informed the Queer Families project, which sought to co-explore and richly-describe diverse meanings of ‘family’, and ways of ‘living’ family. The project explored the history of the skills, practices, hopes, and dreams that family members brought to their versions of ‘family’, and drew on the metaphor of ‘family as a verb’, to explore alternatives ways of doing ‘families of choice’. The article first contextualises the concept of family, deconstructing dominant ‘family’ narratives in western cultures, and historicising the notion of ‘nuclear family’. It then describes the key narrative practices that informed the project, including re-authoring and re-membering conversations, therapeutic letter-writing, and documenting shared community themes. The article then describes the collective narrative practice of sharing these themes with other people to generate ‘re-tellings’ that were then shared with the initial families in the project.