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Fakultät Sozialwissenschaften

Chapter – "Forgetting Gender while Desexualising Friendship?"

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Chapter on friendship and heteronormativity published

The recently published volume “Close Relations: Family, Kinship and Beyond”, edited by Helena Wahlström Henriksson and Klara Goedecke, contains a chapter by Leoni Linek. Using qualitative couple interviews from her PhD project, she analyzes how people in cross-gender friendships deal with heteronormative assumptions. In this chapter, Leoni Linek shows that heteronormativity organizes the friendship practices of people across the spectrum of sexual and gendered identities and orientations – and that this link between heteronormativity and friendship has fundamental ambivalences: On the one hand, ‘platonic’ love is a narrow and constraining norm, but on the other hand, it allows for a situated 'forgetting’ of gender in cross-gender friendship.

The chapter  „Forgetting Gender while Desexualising Friendship? Heteronormativity and Everyday Practices of Cross-Gender Friendships Among Adults in Germany” as well as the book are now available online.