Grieving the Multiple Losses of LGBTIQ+ Breakups

Abstract

This article addresses a topic seldom discussed in public or academic research: grief following breakups among LGBTIQ+ people. By attuning its analysis to queer grief as it is sensed, lived, and entangled within multiple grief assemblages, this article moves beyond prevailing frameworks for understanding LGBTIQ+ breakups, which often take structural and legal problems as their starting point. It advances and develops an affect-theoretical approach to grief in the context of LGBTIQ+ relationship breakups. Highlighting the multiplicity of queer grief assemblages, the article demonstrates how various elements – human, nonhuman, psychic, cultural, and spatial – are entangled in these assemblages, alleviating and complicating the grieving process. The analysis draws on thirty interviews with Finnish LGBTIQ+ people who have experienced relationship breakups. Employing Deleuzian research methodologies, the study seeks to identify the elements and relations within queer grief assemblages through which flows, blockages and accumulations of grief emerge. In these assemblages, affective intensities often condense around grief for the loss of a partner; however, the assemblages always extend beyond to encompass other people as well as ideological, spatial, material and psychic elements. Rather than contributing to the most intense affective peaks within the grief assemblages, heteronormative elements often grief, either by entangling painful past experiences that puncture the flow of grief in the present or by preventing grief assemblages from extending beyond the personal and private into the public sphere.