A Feminist and Decolonial Approach to Kinship: An Ambiguous and Ambivalent Account

Abstract

This article briefly traces newer kinship studies at the edges of kinship formations and argues that a feminist, decolonial examination of kinship interrupts cultural relatedness as a capital set of social relations meant to satiate the ache to belong to or progenerate a group. Examining the coordinated relationship between kinning and de‐kinning, the author exposes the suffering the social contract fails to register but reinscribes. Central to this analysis is kinship's global colonizing matrix dominated by white‐heteronormative ableism that shapes and prices commodified belonging and generation. This global colonizing matrix is the focus of this inquiry, examined through a cursory consideration of the author's lived experience as a transnational and transracial adoptee and racial minority scholar who teaches majority BIPOC students. This account theorizes a specific experience of kinship to broaden the analysis for others to locate their narratives and ongoing contributions to the deformation and reformation of kinship studies.