Taking as starting points the two ideas that “kin-making is making persons” (Haraway 161) and “kin is an assembling sort of word” (162), this paper explores how transspecies kin-making can be understood specifically in terms of the connection between making and sustaining kin and making and sustaining worlds. Taking transspecies kinning to include a broad spectrum of more-than-human life, what kinds of assemblages can enable sustainable worlds? Moreover, rethinking kin-making entails rethinking world-making in ways that are amenable to new kinds of assemblages. Here, Levi R. Bryant’s “hominid ecologies” can function as a space for conceptualizing alternatives to anthropocentric kinship constructions predicated on human singularity and mastery. To help formulate what the assembling of kin in these ecologies could involve, I draw on Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality. If bodies are not only micro-ecologies in themselves but also always involved in complex biological and material exchanges with human and more-than-human life, then reconfiguring kinship necessarily involves rethinking the role of biological matter.
These ideas are explored in relation to two novels by Joan Slonczewski, A Door into Ocean and Daughter of Elysium, set in a distant future and in a distant part of the universe, in a reality brought about through an Earth-centered apocalypse. This future includes over-population, terra-forming and colonization processes as well as struggles for the rights of both human, non-human animals and artificial intelligences. The two novels construct rich forms of relatedness and create worlds in which kin and kin-making are continuously negotiated. Moreover, readings of these texts can help us be attentive to the limits of the assemblages we manage to put together and the kinds of persons we can create through kinning processes. This paper thus argues for the necessity of rethinking kin-making and points to the possibilities involved in radically doing so, while also recognizing and engaging with the limits of such theoretical and imaginative moves.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana UP, 2010.
Bryant, Levi R. “Hominid Ecologies.” Blog entry on larvalsubjects.wordpress.org. Hominid Ecology | Larval Subjects . (wordpress.com). Posted May 10, 2012. Accessed September 22, 2022.
Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” in Environmental Humanities, vol 6, 2015, pp. 159-165.
2023.
27th Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS 2023): Crises and Turns: Continuities and Discontinuities in American Culture and Society, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, May 25-27, 2023