In this article, we dwell in the affective history of queer family and the family from which queers and trans people are potentially ousted in order to consider how family photography can be a psychic and social strategy of survival, but also a material archive of minoritized history. We engage with the photography exhibition Queering Family Photography. Drawing from psychoanalytic and queer theories of kinship, we propose that the family continues to be a site of ambivalence for LGBTQ2+ studies because it is a technology of nation building, but also a site of creative belonging for people expelled from the natal home. The exhibition helps to unearth structures of feeling that are made of and from queer kinship.