96 CHAPTER FOUR
and subjectivities that do not conform to binary genders but also interper-
sonal bonds that do not comply with heteronormativity. This gaze reflects
the naturalization of kinship as emanating from reproduction and fixed by
evolution. The participation of the biological sciences in articulating this un-
derstanding of kinship is well documented and has been the subject of con-
siderable feminist and queer critique. For many critics, kinship, not unlike
marriage, is a social construct, a projection of gender norms onto biology,
and as such it must be either radically reformed or rejected. Kinship can also
be understood as affective, however, potentially exceeding heteronormativity
through feelings and ties that do not adhere to social norms and rules (Eng
2010). In this chapter I explore the treatment of the neurobiological body as a
scene of affective kinship, a site for the generation and feeling of ties to specific
others, in both humans and nonhuman animals. The neuroscientific enact-
ment of such bonds is principally heteronormative, I argue here. Yet there are
also queerer potentialities, including moments of misrecognition that reveal
the complexity and multiplicity of affective ties in not only humans but also
nonhuman animals.
Stories of Kinship
Kinship is a biocultural category; it can, for example, encompass both
blood relations and socially arranged alliances, as well as the ways these
constitute each other through the patterning of mating and reproduction.
To put it another way, kinship is “a technology for producing the material
and semiotic effect of natural relationship, of shared kind” (Haraway 1997,
53, cited in Norton and Zehner 2008, 117). It is also what Myra Hird calls
the “strongest structure of exclusion” and inclusion (2004, 222). Kinship is a
highly contested phenomenon because what counts as kinship is implicated
in, and has immediate and material bearing on, almost every aspect of
social life: on legal, political, religious, and economic institutions; on iden-
tities, relationships, and communities; on health, well- being, and longev-
ity; on work and leisure; on citizenship; on patterns of social equality and
inequality; and on and on. It even matters to time: What counts as kinship
affects the meanings of the past, the comparative weight of the present, and
the ways the future can be imagined (Halberstam 2005; Freeman 2010).
I want to begin by contrasting two very different ways of thinking about