Home Affairs: Rethinking LGBT Families in Contemporary South Africa


Carien Lubbe-De Beer & John Marnell

Publisher: Fanele, an imprint of Jacana Media
Publication date: 2013

ISBN: 9781920196332

Format: paperback

Currently, Home Affairs is out of print, a copy is available for viewing in the Gala Library

Home Affairs ... is a wonderful contribution to scholarship on emerging family forms, and will no doubt prove useful for students and researchers in many disciplines.
– Professor Charlotte Patterson, Centre for Children, Families and the Law, University of Virginia 

Despite increasing visibility of same-­sex relationships in South Africa, there remains a distinct lack of research and public discussion around LBGTQIA+ family formations, practices and related legislative and social issues. This unique collection of essays, interviews and visual materials confronts this silence by capturing recent scholarship and documenting the experiences of LGBTQIA+ families. By bringing together work from diverse academic and professional disciplines – as well as family portraits from two recent photographic exhibitions – Home Affairs challenges what it means to be part of an LGBTQIA+ family in contemporary South Africa.

About the editors:

Carien Lubbe­De Beer holds a PhD in Educational Psychology with a thesis titled : The Experiences of Children Growing up in Same­Gendered Families. She is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Pretoria. She is an NRF­rated researcher and her research interests focus on lesbian­parented families, specifically the experiences of parents and their children, as well as sandplay therapy in vulnerable communities. She serves as a representative of the Psychology Society of South Africa (PsySSA) on the International Network on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Concerns and Transgender Matters in Psychology (INET), which is hosted by the American Psychological Association. 

Prof. Lubbe­ De Beer received the Emerging Researcher award in 2012 from the Educational Association of South Africa.

John Marnell was the Publications and Communications Coordinator for Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action. He holds a BA (Hons) in classical literature and a MA (editing and communications), both from the University of Melbourne. Since 2008, he has worked as an editor for a number of Australian academic journals, including Overland, Metro and Screen Education. He is also the coordinator of Overland’s Connections Project, an initiative that seeks to foster greater editorial diversity in Australian publishing by supporting emerging writers from marginalised communities and backgrounds.