Accounting for the Familial: Discourse, Practice and Political Possibility
Families can be frustrating. Donna Haraway is not alone when she remarks that she is “sick to death of bonding through kinship and ‘the family,’” and longs “for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality and persistent hope” (Haraway, 1997, 265 cited in Nash, 2005, 450). Nash (2005) echoes this frustration in her refusal to specify her own genealogy in her research on Irish genealogy tourism. But as Nash also points out, this irritation arises from her own privileging of mobile, unrooted identities, a position resonant with the emergence of transnational identity literature. Perhaps this tendency to privilege mobility, flows, and transnational identities is in part responsible for the family’s ‘absent presence’ in geography (Valentine, 2007). Indeed, a number of geographers have called for more focused research on the family and heterosexuality (Domosh, 1999; Hubbard, 2000), intimacy (Valentine, 2007; Oswin, 2010), geopolitics (Harker, 2010, 2011, 2012), biological relatedness (Nash, 2005), and immigration politics (White and Gilmartin, 2008; Conlon, 2010; Martin, 2011). In this intervention, I pull together recent work beyond and between geographers, rethinking familial relatedness and showing how taking families seriously opens up opportunities for connecting seemingly disparate political projects.