THE TRICKSTER
We want to create new realities, new family roles, new terminologies — but we wonder whether we are fooling ourselves to believe that we are able to think beyond what we are conditioned by. Would we not fall into the trap of replicating a similar reality to the one we want to emancipate from? Is there a risk that establishing kin relations might produce new power positions that would, again, put the precarious people
LAW, LOVE, KINETICS AND GENETICS
A brief and non-expert look into family laws articulated in UN, EU and Belgian juridical documents was enough for us to realise that laws that protect kin relations are missing. We acknowledged that in order to get there, a new articulation of what the law refers to as the notion of “family” and “human” is unavoidable and urgent. We affiliate with those who see the human as always more than human, and family as kinetic and not merely genetic. As the law system allows itself to even judge what true love is, we dream that in an ideal kin constitution, the definition of love would include the loves that we find in political marriage — love as a redistribution of one’s privileges, and love that invites the other in, in order to undo us.
THE AUNTIES REVOLUTION
In almost every nuclear family there is an aunt. Aunts can connect to the family through endless possibilities of relations. It’s a figure that can potentially queer the character of relations within the family and that brings the family world in contact with other worlds. We are all potential aunties, of our potential kin families. Aunting is a practice that can sustain communities. Aunting roles are to be invented, practiced, emerged and experimented with through care. We might even need to let go of the nuclear family terminology in order to imagine new roles and relations that can constitute a kin family. Let us welcome some kin family roles into the world — the Batista, the Farterre, the Dingma, the Starsty, the Em-CEE. May you multiply and diversify as much as the realities we all want to create and commit to!
WE WANT TO FAMILY THE RIVER, THE STONE, THE SNAKE AND THE OLD SPIRIT
If we kin, then we kin and co-exist with our tangible and intangible relations. We water the growing tree in our garden, as much as a mother waters her child… Whether we are mothering or mattering or monstering, we want to live within the more. The more than human, the more availability to nourish bonds and to generate affiliations. The more transpersonal care and dedication given to all the micro-macro cosmic, organic, virtual, subjectivities that surround us and that are in us. We want to celebrate des-acceleration, maintenance and transformation, we want to honor and embody the multidimensional colors and winds of the visible and invisible sounds of entangled matter/s.
CRIP KINSHIP
A Crip definition of kinship expands on the connectedness to everything in and outside of one’s body. Including wheelchairs, guide dogs, urban and rural environments and so on, into a common ground that makes all these agents interdependent, within networks of mutual support across species and things. This alliance messes up with the linear and efficient time we often try to live by and brings us to experience the otherwiseness of the dominant reality and temporality. The solidarity, which this context raises, invites us to reclaim the flexibility of being together, establish collective universal access and practice multisensory translation, no matter inwhich circumstances or atmospheric conditions we find ourselves in.
COLDER THAN FREEZING
The violence of reproduction systems
The speculum is fucking unfriendly, scary and painful… 35+ who desire to become mothers are often treated as sick and in need of medical treatment. Pregnancy for some of us means a purely clinical experience, where the process of achieving the scientific goal excludes a dialogue or consideration of the emotional context that gave birth to the desire for a pregnancy. Many women gave up the process due to the effect of hormones they had to induce, because of precarious and lonely economical difficulties, or because of being treated as if they are an outcast and non-normative. We ask ourselves: Does IVF speak of a technology that is not fully developed? Could women benefit from a more researched treatment that considers the well being of their body with more care? How can the body that carries the baby not be instrumentalized in pharmacopornografic era technologies, and in profit making treatments?
HUMAN RIGHTS FAMILY LAW (1)
European Convention on Human Rights – Article 8
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
HUMAN RIGHTS FAMILY LAW (2)
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Preamble: Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…
Article 16.3: The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
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