NEUROBIOLOGY AND THE QUEERNESS OF KINSHIP 117brication of the biological body in lived experience. Social constructionist
accounts of kinship, which depend on language and human exceptionalism,
underestimate what relational ontologies are actually at stake when they are
threatened by erasure and misrecognition. On what basis should one de-
mand acknowledgment at the hospital? What loss should be recognized at
the funeral? The kinship bonds that so many people want acknowledged —
those that are dismissed and sometimes obliterated by the heteronormative
gaze — are not solely representational. They are not exclusively discursive,
nor even exclusively human. The kinships worth defending involve, among
other things, the lived, felt orientations of bodies toward each other (Eng
2010). When kinships are lost or denied, it is in part bodies that are at stake,
bodies that have been transformed in various ways by unique, intercorpo-
real relationships of intimacy and care, and thus made vulnerable to their
denial or loss (Butler 2010). What is needed, ultimately, is a rethinking of
what it means for humans as well as nonhuman animals to be related, in-
cluding what it means to be biologically related. Being biologically related
does not have to mean genetically related; it can mean having a biological
investment in another, in the form of an intercorporeal tie to another, that
is the product of interaction, intimacy, or companionship. The transforma-
tion of bodies as they live with and toward others is a kind of relatedness
that ought to be recognized. For humans, at least, such relatedness is also
discursive, historical, and political. An intercorporeal perspective may help
us deepen our sense of what it means to say that, as Eng (2010) argues,
affective kinships are woven through with gendered, racial, national, and
transnational histories, because it indicates that these histories in some way
are materialized in embodied experience.