NEUROBIOLOGY AND THE QUEERNESS OF KINSHIP 111leges the nursing dyad, synchrony and its neurohormonal aspect might be
explored in any close relation. Feldman’s lab, for example, has examined
neurohormonal involvement in best friendships as well as between fathers
and infants and partners who coparent.^10
As felt affiliations that are built through intercorporeal experience, Feld-
man argues that attachments are better understood not as the effect of es-
sential traits, but rather as ongoing practices of bodies that occur in specific
temporal, relational, and environmental contexts. While some researchers
are committed to biologically determinist theories that emphasize con-
straint, the focus on affective kinship also enables the exploration of bonds
through the lens of bodily capacity. It opens up the biology of kinship to
social interaction, intercorporeality, and intersubjectivity. It is not too far
from here, I venture, to conceptualizing attachment as materially as well as
discursively performative. As materially and not only symbolically perfor-
mative, attachment bonds can be seen as embodied structures of experi-
ence that, even while they continue to change, have effects that condition
future experience. This view demands both an embodied and, as I argue, a
potentially queer way to think about what biological relatedness is, and of
the implications of its loss, disruption, or erasure.
Rethinking the “Complex” Bond
Many scholars in the humanities and social sciences have argued that open-
ing up the brain to social interaction, affect, and intercorporeality enables
us to move past biological determinism in thinking about the nature/
culture relation. To these arguments, I want to add that it also could help
us move past the relentless heteronormativity of biological stories about
kinship. In that vein, I want to return briefly to the treatment of prairie
voles, which are viewed as nature’s standard for monogamy among mam-
mals and have a significant role in neurobiological knowledge of kinship.
Much of this research is guided by the “evolutionary assumption that each
individual organism (human or otherwise) has as its primary ‘goal’ the
perpetuation of its own genetic material through reproduction” (Willey
and Giordano 2011, 112). This means that all bonds^ —^ sexual, companion-
ate, filial, as well as maternal and paternal — are firmly in the service of
reproduction. Further, it means that in species that form pair bonds, sex-