98 CHAPTER FOUR
kinship from the biological ground up: the felt ties upon which, as they see
it, kinships depend.
Kinship is deeply embodied in the neurobiological story; it is built not
on the rules of culture, but on the body’s capacities for generating inter-
corporeal bonds. This focus on felt ties addresses in some way what can
be called affective kinship. Rather than a mechanistic reflection of genetic
rules, kinship becomes a matter of lived feeling that requires intercorporeal
contact. This account potentially opens up the biological understanding
of kinship as embodied and relational. As I describe in this chapter, how-
ever, much of this research is underpinned by the assumption of sexually
dimorphic biologies and evolutionary imperatives. Researchers make het-
eronormative claims about sex, monogamy, and parenting that erase queer
and nonprocreative ties and attachments.
If kinship is constituted by, in Judith Butler’s phrasing, “relationships of
various kinds which negotiate the reproduction of life and the demands of
death... that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency,
which may include birth, child- rearing, relations of emotional dependency
and support, generational ties, illness, dying, and death (to name a few)”
(2004, 103), there are now many visible patterns of kinship that challenge
dominant norms. Social transformations in the past four decades, involv-
ing both new reproductive technologies and also the successes of the fem-
inist and gay rights movements, have challenged the Western coupling of
reproductive and kinship roles. The biogenetic kinship narrative has not
disappeared, but new technologies and the social practices they enable un-
derscore how kinship is, as Hird argues, underdetermined. In vitro fertiliza-
tion (ivf) and other forms of assisted reproduction technologies, egg and
sperm harvesting, surrogacy, and transnational adoption are widely used
by straight, gay, cisgender and transgender people to reorganize traditional
family patterns. Perhaps we are already in a future where “genetically ref-
erenced categorizations of kinship will hold less practical significance for
many people” (Norton and Zehner 2008, 106). In this context biological
stories about kinship emanating from male- female reproduction seem not
simply outmoded, but reactionary and defensive.
Perhaps new forms of kinship underscore the sheer irrelevance of the
biological body. Perhaps they prove something like the triumph of choice
over nature in the private sphere, an idea captured in the title of Kath