Recently a friend presented me with what i consider to be an important provocation, highlighting the privilege required to research in this area, and to casually apply concepts which have a deep history of causing harm.
“How is this (xenofam) distinct from queer kinship? And is kinship too saturated with nationalism for westerners to be trusted with it as an infrastructure for building new worlds?” While I am reluctant to abandon queered family (which is not the same as queer family), I take as a starting point Firestone’s position that the family is the seat of systemic violence, especially in terms of constructing normative hegemonies and, consequently, deviant subjects within a punitive system. Family as a concept is too saturated with trauma histories to repatriate it. Kinship might also suffer from that same saturation, but we take heart from the work of David Eng who contemplates “the collective, communal, and consensual affiliations as well as the psychic, affective, and visceral bond[s]” of kinship; Janet Carsten’s work to explore how gender, personhood, code, substance and the house are constitutive of kinship; and the work of queer ethnographer Kath Weston who proposes “that a queer kinship model exists outside of the general heteronormative understandings of time and space.” Not to mention, of course, Haraway’s work to extend kinship to the more-than-human.