10,000 words
65 pages & 16 image spreads

Keywords: Kinship, Family, Fertility, Toxicity, Promiscuity, Desire, Colonial Apparatus, Transparency

Abstract:
My thesis, Promiscuous Kinship, started at a personal level, noticing how my own body was already oriented towards the possibility of having a child, even before I asked myself whether this is something I wanted or not.

I discuss the conditions needed for this possibility as forms of authorship. Gender, morality, and biology itself can be politically and technologically authored to enable a social transparency under which the nuclear family (an intrinsically heteronormative bubble) becomes the overdesigned model, which makes all other kinship arrangements and subjectivities seem as aberrations.

More than my own desire to have children, I question what it even means to be fertile in a world that is constantly being made infertile by the same apparatuses of limitless capital accumulation and endless growth that enforce the nuclear family as societies only means for social reproduction and reproductive labor.

One of my conclusions is an inherent contradiction between desire and fertility: the biological reproduction that both, the nuclear family and the state demand, is blocked by the toxic apparatus they have sustained over time.

Lastly, I propose promiscuity: abundant, non-selective, extremely intimate, and yet disposable social ties as means of making kinship beyond toxicity, asking when does making kin stabilize our “normal” condition as independent bodies that reproduce a toxic space? And when does it profoundly alter the systems that work us?