http://www.acla.org/revolutionary-love-decolonizing-kinship-and-intimacy

Revolutionary Love: Decolonizing Kinship and Intimacy

Against the common understanding of kinship as a biological connection
by "blood", anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argues instead that
kinship is “a mutuality of being,” a symbolic notion of belonging that
is shaped by culture. And yet the notion of kinship has a different
valence from more public notions of belonging, such as the
nation-state, in part because kinship subsumes the idea of intimacy.
Derived from the Latin intimus, meaning “innermost” or “in-most,”
intimacy has long been associated with the domain of the interior and
the private. Critics such as Julia Kristeva and Jean Baudrillard have
defined this concept in dialectical opposition to the social or
political domain. Yet, as Ann Stoler reminds us, “to study the
intimate is not to turn away from structures of dominance but to
relocate their conditions of possibility and relations and forces of
production.”

This seminar will foreground the decolonizing potential in
multi-generic representations of kinship and intimacy. We will explore
how intimacy and kinship mediate the private and the social sphere, to
bridge the individual and the collective frontiers, or to translate
the personal into the political. The papers we choose will represent
aspects of the wide-ranging, multiscalar effects of hegemonic norms of
intimacy and kinship, as well as the possibilities of kinship imagined
otherwise.

Some questions to consider are: How do constructs of intimacy and
kinship organize not only sexuality and reproduction, but also power
structures built upon related categories such as race, gender, nation,
and capital?  How can we analyze “revolutionary love” as a decolonial
praxis? How is the political embodied in kinship structures? How do
kinship structures influence the way the political plays out in
sociocultural fields? How do narratives instrumentalize tropes,
themes, or figures of intimacy or kinship for political ends? Do
narratives of intimacy help challenge or naturalize power? Do they
work to erase or broadcast hierarchies? What is produced and what is
erased at the nexus of race, sexuality, politics, and the nation? This
panel is interested in themes such as (but not limited to) the
following:

sex and empire
language and love
the politics of domesticity
the materialisms of kinship
sexual difference and kinship
longing and belonging
transnational and/or domestic adoption
notions of belonging across space and time
kinship in collective memory/ postmemory
queer diasporas
queer kinship
genealogical logics and drives
biologism
social (re)production
affect and identification
space and intimacy
revolutionary mothering
interracial contact and racial othering