Special Issue Article Beyond the Western gaze: Families of choice in Poland Joanna Mizielin ´ ska and Agata Stasin ´ ska Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland Abstract Research into queer intimacies and families has been largely conducted from and about the Western (specifically Anglo-American) context. It very often (re)presents a hege- monic, mono-normative paradigm and vision of intimacy and family life, and profoundly influences the scope and methods of such research in other localities. This article uses findings from a large-scale mixed methods study called Families of Choice in Poland which was designed to examine the diversity of intimate and familial practices of non-hetero- sexual lives. It highlights how geo-temporal conditions shape LGBTQ relational lives and, as such, unsettles the dominant Western knowledge on queer kinship. Keywords coupledom/intimacy, families of choice, families of origin, locality, queer kin Introduction Studies on non-heterosexual intimate and familial life have a long tradition in the West. However, most research has been carried out in the Anglo-American con- texts that consequently became the main and often hegemonic reference framework that profoundly influences studies concerning such relationships conducted at other localities (Mizielin´ska and Kulpa, 2011). Dominant research on the personal lives of LGBTQ people may thus be divided into two main categories: research on lesbian and gay couples very often presented in comparison with heterosexual ones (i.e. Kurdek, 2004), and research on psychological outcomes for children and socio-cultural experience of lesbian and gay parenthood (Biblarz and Stacey, 2010; Patterson, 1994). It is also worth noticing that both categories have been concerned mostly with sameness/differences and assimilation/subversion of such a Sexualities 0(0) 1–19 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1363460717718508 journals.sagepub.com/home/sex Corresponding author: Agata Stasin ´ska, Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Jaracza 1 Street, Warszawa, 00-378, Poland. Email: astasinska@psych.pan.pl