On Death and Loss in Queer and Trans lives

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Varpu
Alasuutari
On Death and Loss in Queer and Trans lives
Varpu Alasuutari
We are here today to talk about death.1 As grim as it sounds, life and death
are closely linked to each other. As death is always part of life – both in the
form of people’s own, eventual deaths and the deaths of others – it is also
part of queer and trans lives.
In my dissertation, titled Death at the End of the Rainbow: Rethinking
Queer Kinship, Rituals of Remembrance and the Finnish Culture of Death, I
have studied death and loss among LGBTQ people living in Finland. e
alphabet, here, refers to lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people and
queers, describing how the participants of the study self-identied.
I have approached my topic by interviewing and collecting written
narratives from 14 bereaved LGBTQ people living in Finland. eir
rich and detailed stories describe a variety of losses, including deaths of
partners, ex-partners, parents, grandparents, friends and other people who
the interviewees found meaningful in their lives in one way or another. In
addition, following the principles of scavenger methodology, as described
by Jack Halberstam (1998), I have collected complementary data in order
to contextualise the personal stories of loss with Finnish society in which
1 In Finland a doctoral thesis defence is a public event, in the beginning of which
the doctoral candidate gives a 20 minute talk about their thesis, called lectio
praecursoria.
Varpu Alasuutari’s Ph.D. dissertation
Death at the End of the Rainbow:
Rethinking Queer Kinship, Rituals of
Remembrance and the Finnish Culture
of Death was publicly examined on
5 June 2020 at the department of
Gender Studies, University of Turku.
Opponent was doctor Riikka Taavei,
University of Helsinki, and Custodian
was professor Marianne Liljeström,
University of Turku.
Alasuutaris dissertation is available in electronic form through
UTUPub service:
hps://www.utupub./handle/10024/149503

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they have occurred. is complementary data includes legislative texts,
church guidelines, online ethnography, and an expert interview.
Challenging compulsory happiness
In choosing this topic, I have been following the research tradition
emerging around negative aects in queer studies. is tradition calls for
research that sees through the compulsory happiness of queer existence
(Love 2007), and while doing so, does not overlook the negative or
painful aspects of the lives that are lived outside, or in the margins of, the
heteronormative and cisnormative ways of living.
It can be said that in conducting this study, I have, in the words of Donna
Haraway (2016), ‘stayed with the trouble’. Death certainly is something
that troubles us as human beings. Although death oen appears as a taboo
and as something not easily discussed, the current times of the COVID-19
pandemic have reminded us all of the inherent vulnerability of our lives
and the lives of others. With or without a global pandemic, however, death
is always waiting behind the corner. us, death is hardly a marginal topic
when studying any kinds of human lives.
Queering death studies
When I was sketching the early research proposal for this study in 2014,
the interdisciplinary research eld called queer death studies did not
yet exist. Today, such a eld is emerging through the joint eorts and
collaboration of an international group of scholars in the Queer Death
Studies Network, interested in queering the eld of death studies in dierent
ways (Radomska et al. 2019).
Besides gender studies and queer studies, I consider queer death studies
as one of the fields I am contributing to with this dissertation. My
contribution in this regard is both empirical and theoretical, in the sense
of “searching points of exit from hegemonic narratives” describing death
and loss, which oen have focused on normative understandings of losses
that maer (QDSN 2020).
My theoretical framework is interdisciplinary, drawing mainly on feminist
aect theories, queer theory, death studies, and bereavement studies,
but also on trans studies, social sciences, anthropology, and religious
studies. I have found such a wide array of theories not only useful but also
necessary in analysing and understanding the versatile and entangled issues
discussed in my dissertation. Methodologically, I have followed feminist
methodologies when discussing how the vulnerable stories of not-only-
vulnerable others can be told in ethical ways and aiming to be a vulnerable
observer, writing vulnerably, and self-reexively, about my observations.
Hidden inequalities of death
Temporally, the events shared with me by the interviewees took place
between the 1980s and the late 2010s. is was not a planned temporal
frame, but rather, a result from reaching interviewees who happened to
tell their stories from this era. However, this is also a rich and interesting
era because of the legislative and aitudinal changes that have taken place
in Finland during those same decades. For example, homosexuality was
depathologised in 1981, the laws on gender reassignment and registered
partnership of same-sex couples took effect in the early 2000s, and,
eventually, the law on same-sex marriage took eect in 2017. is is not to
say, however, that equality would have been achieved in Finland by these
changes within this time period, despite the popular progress narrative
celebrating Finland as the role model country of equality.

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In my dissertation I go against the grain of this narrative and pay aention
to the hidden inequalities prevailing in the Finnish culture of death. Some
of them are structural or cultural, resulting from legislation or cultural
habits. In addition, as I show in the study, inequalities may also operate on
the level of aects. is means that they appear on the level of intensities,
sensations, and emotions that may be dicult to verbalise or pin down,
experienced in relation to their structural and cultural surroundings. Such
inequalities may surface in relation to questions such as: what counts as
a meaningful loss or a relationship, what counts as a family or the next
of kin in the context of death, what are the proper ways to bid farewell
to and to remember the lost other, who can we turn to for support when
losing people we care about, and how, and by whom, do we want to
be remembered when we die. ese are questions that I address in the
empirical chapters of the dissertation.
The changing scope of research
Conducting this study has been a lively process. In other words, it has
changed and evolved along the way, and its scope has not always been so
wide. Instead, I started it as a study of LGBTQ people and partner-loss in
Finland, inspired by other studies conducted abroad with similar topics.
At the time of planning the study, same-sex marriage was in the process
of being legalised in Finland, but the law had not yet come into eect.
Although the law on registered partnership already existed, same-sex
couples oen found a separate law demeaning and, as a result, did not
always consider it as a viable or fair option for making their partnership
ocial. In this societal context, I suspected that partner-loss among
LGBTQ people could have distinctive features worthy of studying.
In the process of researching, however, I realised that there is much more
to be said about death and loss in queer and trans lives. Focusing only on
the loss of romantic relationships through death would leave out a variety
of relationships that are, in dierent ways, signicant in the lives of LGBTQ
people. In order to avoid amatonormativity – that is, an unjustied privilege
and overemphasis of romantic relationships (Brake 2012) – it was thus
reasonable to widen the scope of the research to include other kinds of
losses as well. rough this decision, it became possible to discuss not
only partner-loss, but also losses of friends and ex-partners, for example.
Moreover, the change of scale made it also possible to discuss the aective
specicities of losing parents and grandparents. As I found out, these were
quite dierent experiences depending on how the lost family member had
dealt with sexual and gender minorities. For example, if the relationship
with a parent had been a complicated or disrespectful one, this aected
also the loss of, and the grieving for, such a parent.
Queer kinship in the case of death
Meaningful relationships in varying forms, theorised as queer kinship,
ended up becoming one of the key themes of this study. In my process of
analysing and making sense of the stories told, I relied on feminist aect
theories with a focus on families, happiness and the good life, especially
by Sara Ahmed (2010) and Lauren Berlant (2011). I argued that the
normative ideals of what counts as families in the fantasies of the good
life aect also what counts as families, or meaningful relationships, in
the context of the good death. e normative family ideals prevail and
manifest, for example, in the family grave tradition supported by Finnish
legislation and in the funeral etiquee supported by guidelines given by the
Evangelical Lutheran Church, the biggest religious institution in Finland.
e established traditions hierarchise and dierentiate between family
members and other mourners. In these contexts, what counts as family is
dened by law and shared bloodlines.

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For people leading queer and trans lives, however, this normative matrix may
not be sucient when considering the myriad of meaningful relationships.
While people in general, and LGBTQ people in particular, may live their
lives according to more diverse family ideals, the normative ideal catches
us up in the context of death, suggesting that a dierence needs to be made
between those family members who are ocial in the eyes of the state and
those who are not. e former includes parents, siblings, biological or
adopted children, and registered or married partners. e laer, in turn,
includes friends, unocial partners, multiple partners, ex-partners, and
other meaningful relationships that are not legally recognised as familial.
is dierentiation comes up, for example, when deciding who are treated
as the primary mourners of the deceased, who can organise the funeral,
who can be buried together, who can inherit the deceased, or how people
are expected to grieve the loss. However, the ocial or unocial family
status does not always predict or dene the depth of the relationship, the
intensity of grieving, or the ways people want to participate in the rituals
and processes following the loss.
In queer kinship studies, a dierentiation is oen made between the
biological and the chosen kin. My focus on the ocial and the unocial kin
aims at complicating this dierentiation, focusing not on choice or biology
but on what is legally recognised. However, legal recognition does not
always lead to social recognition; and sometimes relationships not legally
recognised may be socially recognised, which further complicates this
division. Moreover, as I propose, kinship is not something that only appears
among the living. e lost meaningful others kept having importance in
the lives of the interviewees, suggesting that the feeling of kinship does
not necessarily end in death. erefore, I suggest that kinship is complex,
breaking the binaries of the biological and the chosen kin, the ocial
and the unocial kin, as well as the living and the dead. Given this multi-
layered nature of kinship within the stories of bereavement, I argue that
my dissertation ended up becoming a study of the complex relationships
of LGBTQ people, of the complicated aects that were ingrained in those
relationships, and of what happened to kinship when death cut some of
those relationships apart.
Complex losses and rituals
Over the course of conducting this study, as I encountered increasingly
complicated and multi-layered relations, I ended up problematising, or
rethinking, the concepts and theories I was drawing on. For instance, I
noticed that the theories I initially followed, including sociologist Kenneth
Doka’s (2002) theory of disenfranchised grief and queer theorist Judith
Butler’s (2004; 2009) theory of ungrievability, return, rst and foremost, to
questions of inclusion and exclusion. ese theories ask who can be grieved
and recognised as lost; and who can be recognised as people grieving the
loss. However, as my study shows, these are not simple, black-and-white
questions. With an analytical focus on norms and aects aached to them,
or aective normativities as I call them, I have shown that oen it is a
question of feeling included or feeling excluded, manifesting in dierent
ways in dierent contexts. us, instead of being entirely disenfranchised or
ungrievable, I argue that the lives and losses of LGBTQ people in Finland
can more oen be seen as both disenfranchised and enfranchised, both
ungrievable and grievable at the same time, depending on the context.
Rituals, too, appeared as complex. In this study I have made an analytical
dierentiation between rituals of death and rituals of remembrance. e
former refers to rituals aiming to bid farewell to the lost person, oen in
culturally prescribed and established ways, like funerals. e laer, in
turn, refers to rituals created by the interviewees themselves, oen less
strongly culturally prescribed, performed either in private or with their

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private networks. Instead of bidding farewell, these rituals were about
keeping the memory of the lost one alive. ese included, for instance,
creating commemorative events, talking to the lost other, holding on
to keepsakes as memory objects, and visiting the grave or other places
with similar aective signicance. With the inspiration of queer theory
and bereavement studies, I have theorised the rituals of remembrance as
examples of melancholic aachments, or continuing bonds, which can be
benecial in the midst of grief and, in the words of José Esteban Muñoz
(1999), help to ‘take our dead with us to the various bales we must wage
in their names – and in our names’.
Culture(s) of death in Finland
e nal question I wish to address is: what can we say about the Finnish
culture of death based on this study? I argue that the Finnish culture of
death heavily prioritises the ocial family of the deceased, as well as the
Evangelical Lutheran Church as an institution. e ocial family of the
lost are those heightened as the primary mourners with both rights and
responsibilities in the context of loss, granted by legislation and cultural
habits. The Church institution, in turn, has power to influence and
maintain these cultural habits in dening death rituals and maintaining
the vast majority of Finnish cemeteries, guiding also how lost people
can be honoured in gravesite memorials. Given the tense relationship
between LGBTQ people and the Church institution in Finland, resulting
from the inability of the Church to treat LGBTQ people with “fully equal
respect” (Hellqvist & Vähäkangas 2018), I argue that having to face this
prioritised role of the Church can be challenging for bereaved LGBTQ
people, regardless of their personal worldviews.
However, I do not claim that the Finnish culture of death is a monolith
with no variation nor a possibility to change and be altered. Instead,
I suggest that there are, and could be, cultures of death in Finland, in
which also the needs and specicities of LGBTQ people are taken into
consideration. Such culture is important also in terms of cultural memory
and in deciding which lives get remembered in public. In my dissertation
I argue that the public rituals of remembrance performed by Finnish
LGBTQ communities, including, for instance, the Transgender Day of
Remembrance, can be seen as examples of queer and trans culture of death
in Finland. At the moment, such culture seems to focus more on public,
political and internationally circulated queer and trans deaths and losses
than on private and unpolitical ones.
On this note, I propose that we need also other types of queer and trans
culture of death: culture that would focus on death and loss as inseparable
parts of all queer and trans personal lives. It could include, for example,
taking dierent family forms into consideration in the case of death, oering
information and examples of death rituals that go beyond the culturally
established and hierarchical ones, making queer and trans lives visible
in the Finnish cemeteries through techniques of queer monumentality,
and creating queer- and trans-sensitive bereavement support services.
Because all of us are eventually dying and losing our meaningful others
to death, having varied cultural examples to follow, having accessible
support services, and having communities to back us up when that happens
would, as I suggest, help LGBTQ people to live through the emotionally
demanding times of bereavement.
is study has evolved, broadened and crystallised when necessary, and
as a result, ended up answering to much larger questions than what I
initially had in mind. As it stands, it is a study that brings new insight
into the experiences of death and loss in queer and trans lives in Finland.
is insight is applicable also in terms of other lives that are in dierent
ways casted in the margins within the Finnish culture of death. Moreover,

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the study produces new knowledge on the conditions of living queer and
trans lives in Finnish society, particularly in terms of kinship, rituals and
dierent kinds of aective normativities aached to them.
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