The Family that Roams

• In Event: Rethinking Kinship and the Family

Abstract

The administrative objective of separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border was to deter “illegal” immigration. Yet these practices raise deep and longstanding questions about the conditions under which the roaming family is perceived as a threat to ideas of proper kinship and political membership. In this paper, I explore the possible meanings of this threat and the ideals that a spectacle of physical un-tethering or suspension might serve. One effect of these practices, I will suggest, is that the migrating child appears to jeopardize its own childhood. This malignant mobility in turn forecloses the possibility of the child’s (threatening) adult vitality. Border crossing thus appears to make moot the hierarchical distinction between adult and child that orders the family. What is more, the disordering of families that border policing effects creates the semblance of a disorder “already” in the migrating family, which is cast a group of harmful child rearers, “bad mothers,” and children “at risk.” This style of border policing interrupts asylum claiming by insinuating that certain ways of acting familial are illegitimate. Distinctions between orthodox and aberrant configurations of kinship govern admission to membership by distinguishing among (racially inflected) kinds of mobility.

There is, however, a much older and unlikely resource for opening up the relations that might pertain between roaming, kinship, and the (ab)errant. In classical Greek thought, errancy is sometimes signified by the verb planaō, which ranges in meaning from wandering to straying, as in the accidental, misleading, or mistaken movements of language or the dangerous and vulnerable mobility of a refugee. Perhaps most famously, the errant also emerges in Aristotle’s biological writings on sexual reproduction, matter, and feminine offspring where it points to unruly yet inevitable forces that articulate and disarticulate boundaries. In Plato’s well-known cosmology, the Timaeus, a locus classicus for the malady of hysteria, the verb planaō also describes a straying in the womb. While the feminine coding of aberrant sexual reproduction has received a good deal of critical attention, the possible connections between these various notions of material and bodily movement, which go through the knot of errant wandering, have not. Taking recent events as a kind of provocation, I ask how the disruptive motions of feminine matter and the unsettling movements of persons deemed foreign on the basis of kinship (itself ground in a particular conception of biological reproduction) might shed light on each other through a shared conceptual vocabulary.

Author

• Demetra Fannie Kasimis, University of Chicago