UC Berkeley

Though they began as a gay male counterpart to the lesbian separatisms of the 1970s, the radical faeries are now a growing movement with thousands of participants in the United States and Europe. This dissertation argues that they are also a kinship phenomenon, a form of extended family. Faeries' polymorphous sexual ethics and economic collaboration entail consequences and constitutive exclu-sions divergent in some ways (but not others) from those of the United States' dominant homonormativity. While some faerie practices are also reminiscent of a new religious movement, others are not, and a careful consideration of the phenomenon in fact destabilizes the distinctions between sexuality, religion and kinship. The case of the radical faeries suggests that religiosity be seen as an erotic orientation and the coming out experience as a religious conversion. Although faeries articulate in many ways the anarchist and ecological themes of modern Euroamerican homosexuality, their own normative philosophies can be rooted in deistic and ultimately authoritarian totalizing ethics, and might be productively re-thought via greater attention to issues of difference and mindfulness. Moreover, while some faeries have achieved remarkable success in establishing rural collective property and new pat-terns of migration, their consensus-based governance processes can be rife with conflicts that might bely claims of filiality. In the conclusion, I argue that same-sex marriage does not go far enough and that advocates for progressive family law reform would be wise to take the example of the faeries into account.