Queering Social Reproduction
Session Organizers: Max Andrucki (Temple University), Sarah Stinard-Kiel (Temple University), and Paul Jackson (University of Delaware)
We are seeking to organize a series of sessions at the 2016 AAG around what we are calling “Queering Social Reproduction”. We are indebted to, but committed to pushing beyond, the recent waves of feminist geographic thinking on social reproduction. Our aim is to grapple with difference, collectivity and new forms of claims making around social reproduction that are in many ways queer and perhaps might be simultaneously unrecognized and overdetermined. This is partly inspired by the current centrality of the figure of the LGBT/Q family in US and Western liberalism. We take seriously arguments about the incorporation of queer families and reproductivities into structures of late capitalism, but we would like to push thinking about queer reproduction further, particularly beyond the figure of the child, to open up space for chosen families, kinships with non-human others, and non-regenerative modes of relationships. We welcome papers that address other forms of queer family and sociality, including those which engage with concepts of queer time, sexual practices, or human/nonhuman assemblages, as a mode of reproduction. This can potentially help us with new ways of conceptualizing queer community-making, place-making, home-making as social reproduction, and move beyond debates about the rise and fall of gayborhoods and the implications for entrepreneurial urbanism.
Like many, we have been thinking about how the triumph of the gay marriage agenda can function as a regulatory ideal that serves to “re-privatize” social reproductive functions and foreclose other, perhaps queer-er, political possibilities. In this moment of transnational crisis and austerity, we welcome papers about the long history of prefigurative attempts to socialize or collectivize social reproduction, and we want to ask how these can be conceptualized not just as socialist/feminist/anarchist, but also queer. For child-rearing practices themselves, considering new agendas and forms of collectivity butts up against emerging ideas of the traumatized child and the pathologization of non-ideal childhoods through theories that locate non-normative domestic ecologies somatically, in children’s brains and bodies, as toxicities. We thus also welcome work that explores how queer, disability, and crip agendas can help us address new fears around generating the “wrong” kinds of reproductive biologies, and ultimately, non (re)productive citizens.
We are also committed to geographies of care and obligation, and how queering social reproduction might engender new ways of thinking about our responsibility to human and non-human others. We are thinking not just about cyborgian models of the post human, but about collective co-becomings, particularly those which enact new non-normative, non-market forms of care. Our goal is partly to understand how collective responsibilities of care, especially for un(re)productive surplus bodies like the elderly, chronically ill or those with disabilities, might have the potential to exceed conservative exclusivities so often associated with invocations of “community” and “family.” We invite papers that place care at the center of an inclusive project of “making kin” and are interested in how new responses of care and responsibility can shift everyday social relations and cohere new collectivities and new orientations.
If you are interested in participating in these sessions, please send an abstract to Max Andrucki (max.andrucki@temple.edu) by Monday, October 19, 2015.
*This session is being organized in collaboration with the paper session ‘De/Naturing Social Reproduction’. Contact wmck@uw.edu if interested in that one.