Recomposing kinship

Abstract

What would happen if we accepted technological connection as a form of reckoning kinship? In exploring this position, I draw on accounts of disability and illness. First, I focus on an account of fecal microbial transplant use and the intimate connections the technology creates between the recipient and donor. This is followed with the case of a woman who relies upon facilitated communication to communicate with her social others, which depends on her use of other persons to interact with a keyboard. In both cases, material connections with and through technology disrupt the putative nature of kinship as based in “custom” and “blood.” Taking technological mediation in the production of kinship networks seriously destabilizes humanist conceptions of the contours and capacities of bodies, eroding the distinction between self and world. In apprizing the role of technology in making kinship networks, attention to disability and illness experiences of the world point to ways out of dominant conceptions of the human and the need to ethnographically attend to nonnormative bodily engagements with material worlds as the basis for emergent forms of personhood and subjectivity.

Maternal microbis: How kinship composes reproductive relations for a human‐bovine maternal microbiome

“…Yet, attending to the development of a maternal microbis and its deployment across the species line illuminates deeper entanglements between reproductive bodies. These entanglements return us to questions about how microbes mediate the materiality of reproductive substances and the discourses we use to make sense of them, reminding us that kinship is “a conduit that composes emergent bodies and relations and their connections” (Wolf‐Meyer, 2020, 234).…”

“…Such attention illustrates the active dimensions of kin labor (Pande, 2014) and the classificatory nature of kinship as a heuristic for sorting out human‐human relations, human‐technology relations, and human‐animal relations. Thus, we follow Matthew Wolf‐Meyer in his characterization of kinship “as a conduit that composes emergent relations and bodies [showing] … how kin are both a means to establishing further kin relations and that relations between kin are never an end unto themselves” (2020, 234) in analyzing how different dimensions of mutuality are assembled into relations. Taking this conduit metaphor literally, we can think of kinship as a cultural framework that enables us to understand practices of caring for microbes and being cared for by microbes as familiar processes of kin work.…”

Making kin

“…Feminist and queer approaches to kinship have decentered the heteronormative assumptions of consanguinity and descent in favor of relations of care (Weston 2013), and recent research has pushed us to consider its materiality (Goldfarb and Schuster 2016). From a standpoint in disability studies, Wolf-Meyer (2020) proposes that technology can also be kin in that we develop intimacy and mutuality with technological things as they mediate our engagement with the wider world, as with the use of a walking stick or a prosthetic. Webs of obligation encompass more than the living world.…”

From problem‐centered to centering relationalities: Engagements with disability and sexuality in India

“…In resonance with Kafer's approach, I illustrate later in the article how centering relationalities creates new sexual pathways for disabled people. Scholarship at the intersection of feminist and disability anthropology also challenges Western ideals of individualism, rationality, and independence, and it demonstrates how non‐normative relationships can give rise to unconventional forms of personhood and kinship based on empathy, care, and technological facilitation (Buch, 2013; Ghosh & Banerjee, 2017; Rapp & Ginsburg, 2011; Wolf‐Meyer, 2020). I extend these conversations to questions of sexuality.…”