Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Explicitly drawing on black traditions of family, he imagined a partnership, extended kin networks, friendships, and gay social worlds as constituting something more vital.
Shaka McGlotten • Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality
* “Oddkin stakes the claim that the shape of kinship isn’t a birthright but a choice, that the people we choose to gather with are connected to us in ways at least equivalent to those we were born alongside. However odd that gathering may be—and Haraway posits that oddkin includes not only people but every living thing around us, the trees and bird... See more
Mandy Brown • Oddkin
Kinship is so central to small-scale societies that it might legitimately be regarded as one of the main organising principles of the human social world.
Robin Dunbar • Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships
We have a shared history that cannot be replicated. We call each other godfamily—like godparents, except a whole family—and we are there for each other as family would be.
Tiffany Chu • Platonic Soulmates
H]uman beings need all the relatives they can get–as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.... See more
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When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of siblings
Austin Kleon • KURT VONNEGUT ON THE NEED FOR BUILDING EXTENDED FAMILIES
But most serious of all, Judge Davies wrote, was that “Thompson and Sharon are a family of affinity, which ought to be accorded respect.”
Lillian Faderman • The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle
I also know that the person who does wrong, whoever he may be, is my kinsman, not by blood or birth
Rebind
Martha’s not my child, I’d say, as if I was joking, as if my feelings weren’t hurt. I would say: She’s my roommate. Now I can say, she was not my child, but she was the first member of my family. Martha was my best friend and my witness. I had been on my own for so long, swimming upstream, and now I had a partner in it. There’s a bright line betwee... See more