Kintimacy

Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary

Frances Bartkowski

“At a time when walls and fences and barriers are being erected in bricks and mortar and electronic circuitry, we might rather ask what the world would look like if we opened the borders of our selves to the others—-those others whom we resemble though we may be inclined to insist that we do not recognize them as our coevals, our co-evils” (3).

Weaving together such works as John Sayles’ film Lone Star, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Cai Hau’s A Society Without Fathers or Husbands with studies about pigs as organ donors, and stories from primatological research and evolutionary science, Bartkowski suggests kintimacy as the trope for the killing/kissing worlds we have inherited.

“If we could think and live this kissing-killing knot with empathy as the starting point, we might be able to move forward into our mixed and mingled futures with forms of radical hope fashioned out of old histories of despair" (139).