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Abstract
This dissertation investigates how LGBTQ+ elders in San Francisco navigate aging, care, and relational life amid shifting cultural, economic, and institutional terrains. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with queer seniors, community organizations, and volunteers between 2022-2023, it foregrounds the lived experiences of older LGBTQ+ adults who face intersecting challenges of isolation, displacement, declining health, and institutional neglect. San Francisco’s history as a queer sanctuary and its present as a gentrified, bureaucratically managed city provide the terrain for exploring how care is practiced, improvised, and stratified within and among LGBTQ+ subgroups. Across this landscape, I argue that queer elders are not simply recipients of support but active participants in reshaping kinship and care under conditions of uncertainty. At the heart of this project is a theoretical framework that draws together insights from queer theory, critical kinship studies, and the anthropology of care to interrogate how relationality is structured by precarity, improvisation, and institutional mediation. I engage with theorists such as Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Lee Edelman to ask what kinship becomes when it is no longer anchored in futurity, legality, or reciprocity. Building on and complicating concepts like chosen family and fictive kinship, I introduce the notion of ad hoc kinship to describe the contingent, often asymmetrical caregiving relationships that arise not from deliberate choice but from shared social positioning, need, and proximity. This concept threads through but does not dominate the dissertation, which more broadly considers how queer life endures, and at times falters, within systems that alternately enable and limit care. Each chapter focuses on a distinct but interrelated aspect of queer elder experience. Chapter 1 introduces ad hoc kinship through grounded ethnographic encounters and situates it within the broader history of mutual aid, volunteerism, and the AIDS crisis. Chapter 2 examines intergenerational tensions and shifting linguistic politics within LGBTQ+ communities, analyzing how older adults navigate changing norms around gender and recognition. Chapter 3 interrogates the promises and limits of intersectionality and institutional inclusion, tracing how bureaucratic care systems reconfigure the terms of relational life. Across these chapters, the dissertation argues that aging queer people assemble lives and support systems that challenge normative expectations of kinship, care, and coherence—offering not a triumphant narrative of resilience, but a textured account of how people make do, make kin, and make meaning of aging queerly.