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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

Humans have always known we cannot survive alone, and that to protect ourselves, we need to persuade others to care about us. We cultivate trusting reciprocal pacts with other people – blood relatives, but also friends and neighbours - through which reassure ourselves we can both care and be cared for, if the necessity strikes. These ties can have ... See more

* “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.

. . .

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

Oddkin

Mandy Brown aworkinglibrary.com

Friends typically are defined as people who mutually select each other for friendship; with whom one shares companionship, interests, and values; in whom one can confide; and for whom one feels concern and affection. Friends are expected to be trustworthy with respect to giving solid advice and holding confidences, to engage in appropriate levels o