Abstract
This article explores Finnish LGBTIQ+ people’s break-ups. The long battle for equal rights has placed LGBTIQ+ people’s relationships under pressure to succeed. Previous studies argue that partners in LGBTIQ+ relationships try to appear as ordinary and happy as possible, and remain silent about the challenges they face in their relationships. Consequently, they may miss out on opportunities to receive institutional and familial support. This study aims to move beyond recurrent frameworks that take the similarity or difference between LGBTIQ+ relationships/break-ups and mixed-sex relationships as a predefined point of departure. The analysis draws on ethnographic observations of relationship seminars for the recently separated, an online counselling site for LGBTIQ+ people, survey data, and interviews with LGBTIQ+ people who have experienced recent break-ups. It employs the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblages in order to show how different components and manifold power relations come to matter in different ways in the course of the open-ended becomings of relationship break-ups.
Highlights
This article explores a phenomenon about which little is known: the relationship break-ups of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer and/or questioning people (LGBTIQ+, where + is an acknowledgement of the non-cisgender and non-heterosexual identities that are not included in the initialism)
We suggest that LGBTIQ+ people’s break-ups can best be understood through assemblage theory, which is a way of mapping how things come together, and what the assembled relationships enable to become or block from becoming (De Landa, 2006; Ringrose and Renold, 2014)
We have extended current perspectives by conceptualising and analysing LGBTIQ+ break-ups without taking their ‘similarity to’ or ‘difference from’ mixed-sex relationships as a predefined point of departure
Summary
This article explores a phenomenon about which little is known: the relationship break-ups of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer and/or questioning people (LGBTIQ+, where + is an acknowledgement of the non-cisgender and non-heterosexual identities that are not included in the initialism). Previous research on LGBTIQ+ relationships and break-ups has often compared either same-sex and mixed-sex couples, or female couples and male couples Since assemblages emerge from the interactions between their parts (De Landa, 2006: 21), to mobilise this conceptual framework is to refuse to reduce break-ups to reasons, or to straightforward notions of causality that flatten our understanding of separations It rejects short-cut explanations of LGBTIQ+ break-ups that foreground top-down operations of societal power (see Kolehmainen and Juvonen, 2018). The first author, Annukka Lahti, is conducting postdoctoral research on LGBTIQ+ break-ups (Project ‘When the Rainbow Ends’). Letters collected by a research assistant in 2016; email consultation conducted by Kolehmainen
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