Radical Intimacy by Sophie K Rosa

Author:Sophie K Rosa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

Loyalty and forgiveness are two more ‘family values’ worth examining as we imagine and create kinship beyond the nuclear and biological. Whilst, at one end of the spectrum, families frequently reject queer offspring out of hand, at the other, they purport to be bastions of support ‘through thick and thin’. What this often looks like in practice is brushing harm under the carpet. Because ‘family comes first’, because ‘we’re still family at the end of the day’, neglect, abuse and violence are often permitted within its ambit. The loyalty and forgiveness families sometimes show some members usually looks nothing like transformative justice; accountability is rare in cultures of domination and silence. Nevertheless, there may be a helpful granule, at least, in the nuclear family’s false claim to unshakable devotion: the idea that no one is disposable.

In an abolitionist future, a care commune cannot be carceral; it cannot respond to harm with further harm through punishment and ejection. When people hurt each other – as all of us do – we must not turn away, but stand by the person who has been harmed and be led by their needs, whilst supporting the perpetrator to take responsibility, make efforts to repair, and change their behaviour.

The idea is that family is ‘bound by blood’. And whilst this principle is responsible for much agony, people who make biological babies often claim that from having progeny there springs hope. Having reproduced, parents recount discovering a new fervour for the future, or being instilled with a greater sense of stewardship over the planet. Could some sense of parental futurity extend outwards, beyond the genetic, to help give birth to a better world? If children are the future, how might making children differently reshape the future? Or, as the activist and scholar Loretta J. Ross asks: ‘How do we get from a conservative definition of mothering as a biological destiny to mothering as a liberating practice that can thwart runaway capitalism?’37

In Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, independent scholar and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes about mothering – ‘especially the mothering of children in oppressed groups, and especially mothering to end war, to end capitalism, to end homophobia and to end patriarchy’ – as ‘a queer thing’.38 Mothering might be a way to recreate the self and the world; or as Gumbs puts it, a way of ‘breaking cycles of abuse by deciding what we want to replicate from the past and what we need urgently to transform’.39

Resisting the forces of ecological disaster could indeed be spurred on by wanting a bright future for ‘your’ child; but caring for the planet need not be – must not be – contingent upon having biological offspring. Many Indigenous cultures hold the responsibility of care for all life dear. Ecologies are not simply protected ‘so my kids can enjoy them’, but for their own sake, and for the sake of all beings. In this understanding, ecologies are not protected so that extraction can continue for our kin, but because the land, the air, the water – they are our kin.

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