Ana Eclair

Family Constellation therapy has become a highly popular experiential therapeutic modality, offering participants a way to explore and reimagine their family relationships and ancestral connections. But what does this practice reveal about contemporary preoccupations with roots, lineage, and belonging — and whose stories does it tell?

As part of the Defamiliarizing Geslacht theme group, Ana Eclair examines how Family Constellation therapy simultaneously upholds traditional heteronormative kinship structures and reconfigures complex forms of relatedness. Drawing on the concept of geslacht, which captures the intertwined meanings of sex, gender, sexuality, generation, and lineage, she investigates how historical lineages and forms of biological and non-kin relatedness that have been silenced, deemed non-existent, or rendered unspeakable can be retrieved, reinforced, and reimagined through this therapeutic practice. In doing so, the project sheds new light on the contemporary preoccupation with individual genealogies, roots, and lost ancestral connections.