Tamara Lea Spira, "Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times" (U California Press, 2025)
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Welcome to another episode of the New Books Network Gender Studies channel. My name is Sharon Yam, and I am a professor of writing and rhetoric and digital studies at the University of Kentucky. And today I have the honor and pleasure to talk with author Tamara Leah Spira about her new book, Queering Families' Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times.

Dr. Spira is Associate Professor of Queer Studies and American Studies in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. So welcome, Mari. Thank you.

So your book is very timely, especially given the political moment that we're in. And I'm very excited to be talking to you about it. So for the readers who have not read your book, which I assume that many of have not because your book really just came out from the University of California Press, if you can give us a little bit of a summary of what this is about.

Yeah, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here and I love reading and teaching your work. So it's special to be having this conversation. Queering Families is a project that very much emerged out of my experiences as a queer parent confronting and really trying to survive many of the contradictions that I faced and saw many in the community facing.

as we were trying to...

kind of make and expand and proliferate kinship in accordance with our politics. And so what the project does, I sort of think of it in two layers. The top layer is it really traces the shifting dominant meanings of queer family from the late 20th century to the present and the ways in which the most kind of elite and privileged sphere of

queer folks have been interpolated or drawn into extraordinarily violent projects of U.S. imperialism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, through the ways in which they are enjoined at a cost to participate in

what is always this kind of shaky category of legitimate family. So on the one hand, I'm really kind of tracing this dominant arc of homonationalism through the institution of the family. But at the same time, I really wanted to show the ruptures and show the counter narratives that have always been present, the ones that I myself kind of inherited politically and have seen lived and lived out in

specifically through queer of color, black feministist, political, you know, feminist radicalisms in which modes of loving and creating relationships have been at the heart. There's been this, you know,

erotic politics at the heart of every radical political project of world making. And so I wanted to shift the ways in which we're thinking about queering families away from notions of this kind of normative draw into violent institutions and instead really hold up and honor these counter projects of world making that are ever more necessary, as you mentioned, now when the stakes are

which many of us have already lived out for generations, are very much kind of front and center in the political conversation. Yeah, thank you so much for that summary. And I, in particular, find the opening of your book and your acknowledgements very moving, and you really articulate that personal connection to the project. So I know that you want to read a part of

a love letter that is an adaptation of the acknowledgements. If you want to kind of share that, those moving words with our audience. Oh, sure. Thank you. Yeah. This is a letter that I adapted from the acknowledgements after my editor asked me to try to convert it into a standalone piece and all I'll just start reading and we'll see how long, how long it makes sense for me to go on for.

But maybe I'll say that I'm calling this a queer love letter, but we can kind of think about the letter that I'm writing as the book itself. So this is a queer love letter to those across the world who are being persecuted for who they are, for those being scorned for the love that they give, for those who are being told that by virtue of their race, gender, birthplace, faith, they're anything less than an integral part of the whole, for the

for those who are being told that their existence is anything less than sacred. This is a letter for those who taught me that a life can be measured by the extent to which one makes the world a more beautiful place for all. It is a letter for those who instilled in me a decidedly queer sensibility that the future can and must always be seized by rebels of the status quo.

This is a queer love letter to those who, no matter the intensity of their brilliance, understand that they will never be more than parts of a larger totality, yearning to be reunited ashes to ashes, dust to dust, flesh to flesh.

This is a queer love letter from my parents who created the world for me, giving their all to raise the next generation with a lighter and brighter flame and thus a future. This is a queer love letter from my mother, Andrea, who fought tooth and nail through abuse to raise children who would not have to do the same. This is a queer love letter from my father, Philip, who died far too young, his life burnt short by the intensity of his flame.

This is a queer love letter to the extended family that raised me. As the child of artists and dreamers, I grew up at the knees of many who loved with ferocity. This is a letter for my second mom, Freddie, who always showed up for me through thick and thin and threadbare and abundance yet again. This is a queer love letter for my brother, who is the sweetest memory of our past and an even sweeter dream of futures to come.

This is a queer love letter for my teachers who model their lives in the pursuit of struggle as love lived through poetry.

This is a queer love letter to all parents in an age of pandemics and floods, of fascism and genocide. Our first baby was conceived on the day of the 2016 U.S. elections, my partner gripping my hand in the fertility clinic as the election results streamed in. Our second baby was born in 2020 amidst wildfires and the pandemic, the smoky air dancing around her cradle while grandmothers and other loved ones could not enter our front door.

This is a letter for those who awaken in the morning with the fear that we have brought our babies into an uninhabitable world. This is a letter for those who go to sleep with a renewed belief in our children's capacity to thrive and transform the world called from our ancestors, survivals.

This is a letter for all parents throughout history who have brought children into worlds riddled by slavery, apocalypse, colonialism, dictatorships, tyranny, and war. This letter is for my children, which is to say all children, for my babies need a world in which their entire generation is free to dream, create, and make manifest the futures our ancestors whisper in their ears before they are forgotten once more.

This is a queer letter for all Black, Indigenous, Muslim, Jewish, queer, migrant, trans, marginalized, criminalized, and otherwise institutionally devalued communities who insist upon their inherent right to etch the world in their names.

This is a queer love letter for my friends who helped me reach for the sky while shaping better days on earth. This letter is for my soulmates and queer family born of the same stardust whose hands and hearts alter the substance of me to my core, challenging me to grow bolder. This is a queer love letter for the social movements that have always transformed the material conditions of our lives, reconfiguring the imaginative terrain so that we might dream for more.

This is a love letter for my firstborn, sweet child, Adela. My world was forever altered when the heavens spilled open, bringing you to us. This is a queer love letter for my second babe, Isadan, who turns the world over with the sheer magnitude of her strength. This is a queer love letter for the core of my extended family, with whom I make home a family that knows no limits, but begins right here in my heart with my partner, Adela.

This is a queer love letter for the ancestors who dreamt of a future so much better than the present. This is a queer love letter for all of those across the world who are being persecuted for who they are and scorned for the love that they give. The love story unfolding here is the one that we write to ourselves and the shared commitments we make to lift one another up in times such as these.

This letter is lit by the lives lived in the ongoing struggle to illuminate pathways to the multiple and more beautiful worlds that we must never cease to yearn for and create. And should this letter, like our work, be erased, let my words be invisible ink made legible by the light of your extinguishable light.

This is a queer love letter to a world where children freely wander rugged coastlines, collecting mollusks, wildflowers, and driftwood, where children pound pianos free, twirling tangled curls unruly. This is a queer love letter to our collective freedom, dreamt to and from a place that can and will be where all the children dance once more.

Thank you so much, Mari. That is beautiful. And the book is also dedicated to your two children. And in the dedication, you also wrote, which is to say for all children, especially the murdered children of Palestine. So I'm going to open up by asking you what

What was the origin story behind this project and how did you kind of make this connections between doing queer scholarship, reproductive justice scholarship with your own children and also that extend to your care for children and all over the world? Yeah, well, you know, the book in many ways really was born in...

2016, as I had a small, medically fragile infant at home, we were under doctor's orders to rise every two hours to feed our baby. It was, you know, it was a struggle. And as I was doing that in this state of, you know, such a haze and such utter exhaustion that many folks I'm sure can identify with,

I was listening to the cries of kids who had been separated from their families at the border. And, you know, in the middle of the night, I had these kind of lucid moments of,

ghosts prior whispering to me from, you know, some of my own ancestral lines. You know, and I'll say that, you know, I'm an activist and I'm an organizer. So it was really important to me to understand, you know, there's nothing more vulnerable and tender than holding a medically fragile child who you love more than you ever knew you could love in your arms while you're

really deeply engaged with the utter agony of children being abused in such cruel and horrific ways. And so, as I mentioned in the letter, our first child was born, you know, was actually conceived on the day of the first Trump election. And their sort of upbringing and babyhood was in that time when we were really organizing things.

against everything happening, but with, you know, family separation as a focal point of my organizing. And then our second child was born at the very beginning of the pandemic. And, you know, there were evenings where, again, I was up in the middle of the night feeding this child and

I couldn't see across the street because of the wildfires and, you know, this kind of existential, deep and existential questions about what it means to be bringing generations into the world in many ways, not just obviously through birth and gestation, but what it means to be building futures and building worlds against all odds, which is a formulation of Alexis Pauline Gumbs with

was something that was really central to me. So, you know, intellectually and as an academic and a researcher, I had done a lot of work on what we would call homonormativity, homonationalism, was, you know, always really interested in the institution of the family and so on. But I really wanted to write the book from a place where the real vulnerability and terror, but also the hope that emerges from

from these places of impossibility. I wanted to write from all those places. And in order to do so, I also really needed to excavate the stories and kind of

fill out these genealogies of the ways in which queer family, or as I move towards the end of the book, family abolition has always been wagered. It's not something new. And it is a impulse and ethos of love that I think needs to be at the heart of all of our movements, especially right now when everything is on the line. So that's sort of what was happening in my heart as I sat down to write the book in lockdown. Yeah.

You know, with a toddler running around the house and an infant on my knee and smoky skies outside. You know, that's what was happening in the world around me. Yeah. So because this spoke, and I think for a lot of us who abide by a feminist praxis, our scholarship is always simultaneously important.

theoretical, political, and also personal. Um, but writing something that is so deeply personal and high stake also at a political sense can be really difficult, like not to mention still having to navigate an academic publication market. Um, so, um,

Can you talk a little bit of how you can navigate these connections across the personal, political and theoretical? And also, in particular, I'm really interested in how you see queer reproductive justice as a praxis that we need to use to inform the way that we do scholarship and live our lives. Mm hmm.

Yeah, I mean, I think that this kind of erotic and poetic mode of engagement with the world, which is a decidedly queer and decolonial methodology, is something that drives me not just as a political commitment, but actually as a practice of survival and endurance, you

It was amazing to me to be navigating. You know, one of the chapters looks at many debates within reproductive technologies and

sort of the inward draw of LGBT folks into this highly biogenetic sort of re-essentialization of kinship and relationality that completely astounded me as I was first navigating it when we were, you know, in the process of trying to get pregnant. And, you know, we endured so many violences through the medical industrial complex and so forth. And there was a bit of a gap for me in between the

the pain and the violence of that and realizing that I could apply these analytical lenses and these ways of reading the world and ourselves that were central to everything I do. In other words, I had internalized those violences as we were going through this thing that felt so high stakes, you know, the, the attempt to have a child and there was a bit of a gap and, and, and then it just sort of hit me like a ton of bricks that I,

I needed to apply what I learned and how I engage as a poet, as a researcher, as a feminist scholar and teacher to analysis of the experiences that we were really wading our ways through, which is the most obvious point. So it's always like astounding and humbling when it takes a moment to realize the very things we preach in our own lives where the stakes are the highest.

So, you know, I needed to do I needed to give enough of a kind of architecture of dominance to sketch and map out like a historical terrain of some of the legal shifts, policy shifts, sort of geopolitical and economic shifts throughout the late 20th and early 21st century in which, you know, queer families find themselves. But for me, that was just really a skeleton. And like I said, I wanted to write from those places of vulnerability, of hope, of

of fear, um, in, in honor. Um, you know, not when I say my children, it's not just the kids that I raise. Um, it's this notion that, you know, we are responsible for, for many generations forward and we are responsible for kind of reanimating many generations back. Um, so to be a bit more concrete, I, I start the book. Um, one of the places I start the book is with

the beautiful memoir of Chedi Moraga, Waiting in the Wings, in which she talks about having her child who was born very medically, you know, he was very medically fragile and he was in the NICU and she wasn't sure if he was going to live or die. And this is a period in which there are so many deaths happening in the community all around her, which is the community that I was born and raised in. I was raised in the Bay Area. So we have the death of Teddy Matthews, who's a queer and now sort of reclaimed as transgender.

anti-imperialist activist, the death of Audre Lorde. And all these moments are coinciding with Moraga really trying to make sense of her baby's struggle to survive. And she writes really

really movingly about the ways and the places in which life and death cross. And it's this really deep, intimate space, a spiritual space where life and death cross. That is the space of all potentiality. And I think is really the genesis for change. I think that is what Audre Lorde is writing about when she talks about the power of the erotic. So I really wanted to kind of inhabit and move from that space

in my writing. You know, I did have this moment recently, just to bring it back to the sort of material context we're in now, where I thought, oh, my God, this book is coming out in the world, you know, right now in this political moment of the consolidation of fascism. And I write about my children and, you know, the stakes of doing this

become really clear because we're, you know, in a moment of such heightened repression and punishment and violence for the very stories that I'm trying to unearth.

you know, to bring them to the light. So much violence is organized to keep us from doing that. So I think, you know, there's no kind of simple answer about the heaviness. I think we just kind of take one step forward, you know, and keep moving. But, you know, I very much was trying to write in a tradition of

erotic feminist poetics that dream of and know of different worlds and also are honest and speak truth to power about the kinds of violence that really riddle and, you know, animate white supremacy, imperialism and the dominant social world that we're unfortunately forced to navigate within.

So you use the word erotic a few times and eros is also very prominent in Black feminist thoughts and also in the transformative justice and healing justice tradition. So would you be able to kind of give us a little bit more context on why you are kind of making the connection about the importance of the erotic and the poetic to eros?

queer reproductive justice? Sure. Do you want me to ground it in a chapter or is there a certain way you're thinking of entering the question? Oh, no. I think I'm just wondering about what informs your evocation of the erotic because we often, I think, in kind of more common language use, we associate the erotic with

usually with sex, right? But this is so much more than that. And it is also the eros and the erotic is also can be a basis for liberation, for organizing, for solidarity that I kind of see you strung out throughout and elaborated throughout the whole book. So I'm kind of really curious in hearing you to kind of expand on that. Yeah, I mean, I think that

We can look at different anti-racist and anti-colonial thinkers that have used different language to describe this kind of impulse and ethos, something deeply sacred that drives world making beyond and outside of sort of the dominant mainstream.

machinations of power. But specifically, I am invoking, of course, Audre Lorde, who draws a distinction between what at the time she calls the erotic and the pornographic, although we can, you know, put some pressure on that language. But she's talking about and deriving it from the, you know, the Greek etymology. She's talking about

this life force and energy that animates everything. And, you know, in these famous passages, she talks about the erotic being at the core of everything.

everything from, you know, dancing to organizing to writing. It's that moment when you are really tapped in to the potentiality of life. And I think love in a way that encapsulates the spirit and the body. Lorde, of course, makes a critique of the ways in which the erotic has been limited and distorted to simply refer to sex, which is,

is also punctuated in really narrow terms as a way to limit and foreclose the power that feminists and queers and, you know, folks combating different forms of domination can seize. So it's a, it's about, it's an invitation to tap into the imagination, the poetic, you know, I was having breakfast with a friend before this and I was thinking about,

just playing with my kids, right? And these moments of pure joy at the way the ladybug landed on the flower, these are the moments that it turns out are everything. And the world I want is the world in which that's at the heart and that's at the center. That these moments of...

not being scared to feel, not being scared to remember, not being scared to love. If we actually had conditions in which those things weren't discouraged, everything would be different. And so it's an intimate way of thinking about pathways to nothing less than revolution. Yeah, that is so beautifully put. Yeah.

And throughout the book, you are analyzing a lot of different kinds of artifacts in order to kind of identify these ways in which we can be more imaginative about the kind of world that we can build in a way that is not limited to the existing institutions or to existing dominant ideologies. And so throughout the chapters, you looked at

at memoirs, writings by lesbian writers and activists. You also look at court cases. And then there's the chapter, like you were mentioning earlier, in which you focus on genetics and DNA. So you also have focused a lot on assisted reproductive technologies and the range of tech

and artifacts that you have examined so closely is astounding. So can you talk to us a little bit about how you select these objects of studies and curate your archive?

Yeah, thank you. Just to contextualize a little bit in terms of the archives, the first chapter is looking at lesbian moms' custody struggles of the 1970s and the 1980s, which there's been a bit of scholarship about, some really good work, certainly not enough. But I wanted to start with the poets who were

were engaged in this movement of, you know, there was this movement of retaliation against lesbians for coming out and, you know, sort of state-sanctioned kidnapping through courts as a mode of punishment. And so I wanted to center poets that were writing about it because as we've sort of been discussing, poetry was really animating and

all of these movements, all of these lesbian anti-imperialist movements of the time in which there weren't sort of segregated issues. So we would see, you know, for example, Audre Lorde, because we've talked about her organizing this at a poetry reading alongside folks protesting U.S. imperialism in Central America. You know, there was a

integrated way in which people were thinking about justice and the possibility of future generations. So in that particular chapter, I look at the writing of Pat Parker and Beth Brandt informed by their sort of experiences in this movement and their own experiences of parenthood as a way to show that like a critique of the nuclear normative family

as something that's always been part and parcel of racial capitalism, of settler colonialism. Like this was at the heart of their critique of the separation of lesbians from their parents. And so, you know, in order to make those connections, there are political speeches, there are, there's, you know, some movement history that shows that. But I found that those connections were the most intimately made through the poetry. Definitely poetry is something that kind of

throughout. And I'm always trying to offer kind of an antidote

to the violence because, you know, I'm not sure if this sits with you, but I feel like many of us are always inhabiting multiple worlds at the same time where we know how domination is operating. But we also have this other wellspring that we're drawing from of understanding outside of sort of dominant cultural understandings. And that's a way of resisting and living. And so, yeah, I mean, the next chapter, as you mentioned, looks at biogenetics and

and sort of these conversations around sperm donors and donor siblings. And, you know, I read the memoir of a woman who starts this thing called the Donor Sibling Registry. But I'm always trying to read it against kind of a counter archive, which for me, it doesn't have to. I think if I was an ethnographer, I think I could probably produce the same effect. But for me, it always kind of emerges from the poetic because that's kind of the space, the

the space where I go in the following chapter, I look at adoption and specifically there are these court cases that are pretty amazing, but they sort of, they sort of say it all for me where, you know, these lesbians are suing for, you know, quote unquote, the right, the legal right to adopt children through these Christian laws.

Christian private adoption agencies that have been subcontracted through the state to manage all, you know, foster care and adoption and which are highly discriminatory, of course, highly queer and certainly transphobic. But these are the very agencies that are implicated at the height of Trump's zero tolerance policies in.

And so you have these court cases where the ACLU and Lambda Legal and all of these sort of civil rights organizations are making these cases that it's the right of lesbians of, you know, a certain socioeconomic status.

to take in these kids without asking sort of what is this other queer politics of reproductive justice that's being, you know, very dangerously forgotten in that moment. And so in that chapter, I tried to juxtapose that against movement organizing, right, in which the

sort of point that I made earlier about this critique of the private nuclear family that, you know, our politics need to be anti-imperialist. They need to be anti-racist. They need to challenge colonialism. So, you know, I bring in sort of queer protests against

the policies of family separation. And then toward the end of the book, so I guess what I want to say is every chapter, I try to kind of capture both of those layers of kind of the dominant institutional machinations of power that unfortunately we're forced to live within, but also really bring forth the other imaginaries of struggle that are always there and that, you know,

You know, the more and more as time goes by, I really think the majority of our energy needs to be in feeding those and really feeding and seeding these alternative imaginations of struggle. And alternative isn't even the right word because they're embodied and they're lived. They're just lived in the very subjects and dreams that are, you know, constantly subject to violence and erasure. Right.

Yeah. So you just now you kind of evoke the challenging, the challenges that we need to pose to the nuclear family structure again. And also one chapter that I find to be very powerful is exactly that one that is about challenging biogeology.

of the biogenetic turn and how we, or the society we tend to be socialized into prioritizing genetic ties as kin ties. And I think that even like you have written so persuasively in the book, even in

queer families have been kind of co-opted into this kind of dominant politics of the nuclear biogenetic family structures. And I think that for a lot of people, they'll be like, wait,

Abolish the family? What are you talking about? I can get behind all other forms of activism, but abolish the family. That seems so outrageous. But that is also a very core tenet of queer reproductive justice. So I'm wondering if you can kind of talk to us a little bit more about that.

what you mean by family abolition. And I know that you're also kind of evoking and in conversation with previous work that have talked about that. Yeah, I mean, like you said, there are all these traps that really shocked me. I think that if we kind of follow the pathways that are being given to us to their

for this logical conclusion. They lead us exactly to where we are in the heart of kind of the confluence of techno-fascism and Christian nationalism, wherein, you know, there are these like quick tech fashions

fixes where all of these reproductive technologies or technologies of any sort are supposed to solve all of our problems without looking at any systemic issues. And there's a way in which that overlaps with a very conservative sort of family values politics. So in the chapter on biogenetics, I was looking precisely at that, that there are these far right drivers of

You know, these very politics we've seen materialized now a couple of years after I was working on this chapter where we see, you know, the complete eradication of abortion. We see this, you know, bizarre confluence of very nationalist, white supremacist, pro-natalist discourses that accompany, you know, like ideas of abortion.

Elon Musk sending his sperm to Mars or whatever the thing might be, whilst the bare conditions for life for the vast majority of the planet and the survival of the planet itself is under so much duress and jeopardy. Within this context, and again, this was very much

sort of a product of personal experience, you know, I started noticing such a focus on these bio ties within queer family conversations on these, especially on social media platforms and, you know, within, you know, clinics themselves that very much reprivileged and reified biological relations, which of course can be important. But if you sort of know anything about queer history theory and politics,

I mean, to me, one of the core tenets is that there are many, many different ways of making relation in biology itself is a very, very contested terrain. There's also very different ways of thinking about about genealogy. So I wanted to put pressure on the ways in which there's almost like this politics of penance.

that I'm seeing performed by lesbian and queer folks, you know, particularly those who used sperm donors, this remorse that the sperm donor should be the father and that you're somehow very much harming your child if you don't have that relationship, which some people may, and that's beautiful. But the point is, it's not something that's biologically determined.

I just sort of started tracing the ways that some kind of old school internalized homophobia was really playing out. And I was seeing, you know, lesbian moms predominantly really policing others around the relationship that their child should have with sperm donors.

And it was very troubling and it was very troubling because this is traveling into legal decisions. So, for example, just I think it was like two years ago in Oklahoma, we saw the case where a sperm donor was granted custody over a mom who had anorexia.

quote unquote, non-biological, although we can think about biological in many ways. But the mom who hadn't carried the child, the sperm donor, got custody. And in this political context, we see how many things could go in that direction. So that's what that chapter was trying to do. In terms of family abolition, which I loop back around to at the end of the book, I wanted to kind of trace this genealogy and tell the story about

life that's always been lived outside the nuclear, privatized, monogamous, strictly, you know, regulated family that's enshrined with so many, you know, hierarchies and social mores. And so I was really drawing from ideas of abolition, which, you know, as many prison abolitionists and other kinds of abolitionists are keen to note, you know, abolition is not, you know, simply about the destruction of something. It's about

proliferation and the building and the growing and the kindling of the very worlds, institutions, practices that we need to

in such a way and to such an extent to which, as Angela Davis says, the prison itself becomes obsolete. And so, you know, there have been a couple of genealogies of folks thinking about that with respect to the family, especially socialist feminists in particular. You know, Sophie Lewis has a book, you know, so she's probably the most credited with this, but

But I actually wanted to trace how that genealogy really emerged out of Black and queer of color feminisms. And at moments it's called that and at moments it isn't. And, you know, the title, whether it's called Family Abolition, is really just a device for explaining an idea and a practice. So in that chapter, I wanted to kind of trace it on an intimate and then a meta level. So in the first part of the chapter, I looked at

the relationships and the writing between Audre Lorde and her daughter, and then Chedi Moraga and her son, Rafael, to show the ways in which kind of challenging these hierarchies of parent and child, challenging, you know, once again, kind of the private insularity of the family was part and parcel of their broader political project. This was interwoven within it. And in that we can kind of

find a kind of family abolitionist praxis that's really important and really lived in the daily, right? We see it in these kind of relationships and exchanges between mother and child. And then in the second half of the chapter, I took up the ways in which kind of queer organizing in the precise moment when we see the privatization of the family, kind of this neoliberal moment of the, you know, post-70s, early 80s. Queer communities are, of course,

in the height of the AIDS epidemic and, you know, other forms of deep violence and abandonment, very much mobilizing what Douglas Crimp called promiscuous care, which is this idea that care is not something that's privatized. Care and love and intimacy are

animate our world and need to be the kind of praxis that we extend to everyone. And so Krimp makes this really compelling and important argument that folks that, you know, queer folks are being blamed for the AIDS epidemic, but actually it's queer folks that are going to get us out of it because these are the communities in which practices of care or what, you know, some folks might call mutual aid are at

at the heart of how politics is being performed. And, you know, so I turn to, you know, some of these stories, especially of, you know, this is a time in which many, you know, we talk about the AIDS epidemic, but there's less of a conversation around

predominantly black, but not exclusively lesbians who, you know, had breast cancer. There are these practices of care and keeping each other alive that are really at the heart of everything. And that is very much a practice of family abolition and that it's saying that

Care and love and intimacy isn't something that can be privatized within the family. And this is a political intervention precisely in a moment when we see such a heightened privatization, such a dramatic increase.

abandonment of communities by the state. And, you know, this is also, of course, the moment in which, you know, as Melinda Cooper and others have shown us, we start to see the sort of consolidation and ascendancy of things like gay marriage, that, you know, there can be a displacement of

care onto the private family. And this is the moment when certain very elite and conforming, well-behaving queers are invited into marriage or parenthood. It's only to privatize care and shift that burden off the onus of the collective society or the state, which of course never cared for certain people to begin with. So within this context,

I think if we really listen deeply to these social movement organizing practices and these sort of, you know, poetic exchanges, we hear a really different version of what you could call family. But it's something that's so much bigger and more beautiful. And it's, you know, it's something that I think I experienced. We just didn't call it that. Right. So I'm also hoping to.

inspire the reader to recognize the ways that they've always lived outside the nuclear family. I'll just say one more thing, which is that I teach a class called Queering Families. And I ask folks to, I ask my students to come in and talk about, you know, like family very broadly construed, like a person who's been really influential in their lives.

And it's so incredible because usually at least 90% of the folks are not people that are biologically related. And they always start with a disclaimer, like, this wasn't my real aunt. But, you know, and then so I kind of use that pedagogically to say, wait a minute, like, we're actually always practicing what we would call family and this kind of caretaking outside of this. So why are we constantly reifying the private family? Almost everyone doesn't live inside it. Like, it's kind of a fiction. Yeah.

And so that opens up a lot of space to, yeah, to build futures otherwise or to honor the ways that that is happening and must be happening more. Yeah. And the real part, right, quote unquote real, that's kind of really drive home the point of how ingrained our beliefs are about, oh,

a relationship is not quote-unquote real if we are not somehow connected by biological ties. And even what, like you were saying, what does biology mean? That is also a construction based on ideologies. Like it's not just like a given. Absolutely, yeah. It's so much more complex. And, you know, it's just...

For those of us who aren't fans of the state and aren't fans of, you know, dominant medical, you know, biomedical industries or the medical industrial complex, I think we have to ask a question about why we're allowing those very forces to sanction our relationships. Like, what does it mean to continually return to those places as sites of authority? And in a really practical way, like, what does that do to

to communities? What does that do to children? What does that do to those of us who kind of like exercise and practice love in queer ways in the world? It's participation in one's own, you know, subjugation and domination. It's also profoundly racist. It's also rooted in a settler, you know, notion of the family of a very Eurocentric notion of the family and

that just doesn't historically bear out in most times and places. So what is it that's making us reinvest in that fiction over and over again, I think is a question that we really need to be thinking about for sure. And I want to go back to something that you said earlier on about abolition justice, specifically how abolition politics and

are not only about dismantling things, not just about destroying, dismantling structures and institutions, but perhaps more importantly is about building and imagining something that can be so beyond what we currently have. And I think that sometimes evolution get a bad rap, especially when we encounter people

folks who are perhaps like always like to play the devil's advocate, purposefully misconstruing what it is. It's like, oh, it's all just about, you know, getting rid of prisons, getting rid of families. Now there, I've even heard folks criticizing Sophie Lewis's work and say, now they even want to cancel grandma and grandpa. Yeah.

But what you were talking about, it's like it's less about getting rid of things, but about building and imagining something more beautiful. And so I'm kind of wondering at this point in our world where we are seeing kind of a transnational, the rise of far right ideologies and democracy backsliding.

we need this kind of expansive imagination and world making urgently. So I'm wondering what you think, what do you see as the implications of your book right now with this ethos on the current world? Thanks. That's a really important question and one that I

I'm thinking about all the time. I'm teaching a course right now called Practicing New Worlds that's shaped by many, many thinkers. But that is a term from Andrea Ritchie, who's a lawyer, an abolitionist lawyer. And

You know, she starts the book by talking about how she's been involved in this policy and grassroots organizing work for 25 or so years. You know, she's done such hardcore and incredible work to end these brute injustices.

human rights violations and oppose the expansion of these carceral systems that are so deeply violent and devastating. And she says, having done this work, I'm a very pragmatic person. And yes, I, yet I very much understand that it's just not enough that what we need to be doing is kindling and feeding other kinds of imaginations and actually prefiguring and practicing these other kinds of worlds that we're building. And, you know, in our current context, the,

There's such a disciplining of the imagination that happens. It's so intense. And yet what we're watching is the wild imaginings and fantasies of tyrants and techno-fascists actually being materialized in the world. So I think we have to ask really deep questions about whose imaginations are honored or given space or who simply seizes the space to

to dream and come up with these sort of bizarre fantasies about the future and like how that happens over and against the ways that those of us in different communities are completely caught up at the knees and stifled before we can even begin to dream for something different. And that is a terrain I think where a lot of politics are playing out. There's a lot of social control of the imagination and without understanding what it is we're growing and building,

We don't know where to move. And so I'm honored that you would think that the book contributes to sort of feeding those alternative practices of world making, which to me are the most important thing. And I think can be once again kind of materialized and taken down to the intimate realm.

Life and levels of children or being in and with children and in and with, you know, multiple generations in which ancestral wisdom and stories get passed on in which play is central to life.

I don't know, to the ways we do our daily lives. I mean, if you think about like this hyper capitalist speed up of everything, you know, maybe a lot of parents or folks who spend time with young ones have had this moment where, you know, my kid is wanting to sit in the grass and wanting to dig in the earth and wanting to marvel at the buds that are

you know, coming out of the ground in spring. And I catch myself thinking I just don't have time for that. And then I realized we actually don't have time for anything else. That's actually the most important thing that we can be doing. And, you know, I think about practices of storytelling that, you know, we undertake again with our children and with little ones. Those actually become ways of imagining futures that we can't even dream of.

I also I do think that there's something that I'm interested in about sort of these crossings of life and death and these relationships that children and especially babies like have with those who have already passed. I think there are other visions that are actually being transmuted through kids if we listen deeply enough.

And it's there that I think we can find hope in these really dire and scary times. The one other thing I want to say about abolition is that it's a really interesting moment to be an abolitionist in a time when actually we see the state dismantling all of these structures. And so the tearing down that a lot of us were imagining, I mean, it to be supplanted by building other things like that tearing down is happening. Yeah.

And so the question for me is not, are we going to sort of like resurrect these, you know, like neoliberal sort of very compromised structures of, you know, D.I. or gay marriage or something like that? Like, I don't think there's any going back. I think the question is what is going to replace them. And are we capacious enough to dream and make manifest things?

other things that could replace the very things that are being torn down, you know, by the far right at this time. So for me, that's like a political question that's really been, you know, in my heart and something I've found myself talking about with loved ones frequently.

Yes, that was so beautifully put because I remember Arundhati Roy at the height of the pandemic wrote an essay about how the pandemic is a crisis, is a portal, like yours are portals. Of course, there's no guarantee that we'll go through the portal and go to utopia because that needs to be imagined and built.

And your book ended on a coda on hope. And I know that you want to close us out by reading an excerpt from that. Sure. And, you know, one thing I just want to say before I do that, just to kind of give credit where credit's due, because I haven't mentioned her yet, is June Jordan. She had this deep philosophy about children that was really embedded in the way that she lived.

Practiced kind of the indivisibility of justice in her really brave work to stand up around Palestine in a time when no one was doing it in her deep, brave work of court against white supremacy and anti-Black racism and her deep sort of politics and practices of solidarity in Central America against U.S. imperialism.

you know, my earlier work looks at that, but at the heart of her work was this philosophy of children. And, you know, she really said that the moment when we truly respected children would be a moment when there was a livable world. And I very much believe that. And,

You know, in a moment when we haven't even talked about this yet, but sort of this moralizing these kind of like moral panics around children that are being mobilized to, you know, completely demonize and kill queer and trans folks and immigrants and so on. This notion that, you know, that certain folks are bad for children. You know, this is being mobilized so violently. It's terrifying.

Really helpful and hopeful for me to hold on to June Jordan's philosophy of children. So I just wanted to name that because she was another really influential thinker that shaped the book. But here I can move on to reading. So this is at the very end. Coda Hope. What is at stake in the bearing of a child, biologically or not, in the cultivation of life?

in the ushering in of life forms that overlap with ours, but that neither begin nor end with us. I rise to feed my newborn at 3 a.m. in the summer of 2020.

Wild fire smoke wafts into the bedroom as I check my phone for news about protests erupting across the country in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd, the father of five who was killed while calling for his mama the week that our second baby was born. I grasp for clarity. What is the unattainable price of life in these times? What does it mean to bring generations into this world?

The words of Grace Lee Boggs pierce through my haze. And this is a quote. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the greatest turning points in human history, she reminds us. Boggs' words reach through my deep malaise, sparking memory in a time when every place I've ever called home up and down the West Coast is on fire.

Boggs teaches us that nothing less than revolution is required amid what she calls a great turning, which is a time when, quote, the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values, end quote.

This idea brings clarity, affirming for me that it is not only our young children who are being asked to enter into shifting realities. We too are being called into and to make the world anew. Written against this backdrop, Queering Families has theorized the deeper stakes of queer family making in these times of ever-heightening contradiction. Because queer family so often involves painstaking intentionality among those for whom intergenerational interests

intergenerational kinship is not a birthright. It frequently becomes a flashpoint for fraught questions about the reproduction of our world. Whose children will be brought into this world? How? Under whose authority? Which futures will the earth's children inhabit? What does this mean in times of acute heart-shattering genocide?

These questions only intensify amid the great turning, driving home the stakes of queering families, the sustenance and continuation of sacred life itself. In the time that I've written this book, that newborn has turned into a ready, free-spirited toddler. As I often catch myself thinking, her sheer will and determination alone might be powerful enough to make the world spin in new directions.

The depth and wisdom with which our eldest child entered the world have been shaped by the novel pandemic that framed their transition from babyhood into childhood. This reality splits my heart wide open in pain. At the same time, this reality brings joy, reminding me that the pandemic has offered a refuge from their compulsory socialization into the ugly worlds that no child should occupy.

And the frantic drive to reimpose, quote unquote, the normal, the powers that be have yet to resolve fundamental questions about which futures the Earth's children will inhabit and who those children will be. A fact that is made excruciating as we bear witness to the cold-blooded massacre of Palestinian children in the face of so much global complicity.

Simultaneously, we watch global movements rise to fight back. Boggs' declaration that we remain in the throes of a sea change and a massive push against the restabilizing status quo reminds me that the future remains open and our struggles remain necessary. As Black Lives Matter activist and writer Maya Williams writes in her book Revolutionary Mothering on the Front Lines, quote,

I want us to love and thrive and recreate the world in the image of joy and laughter. I want our humanities to survive into the next century on this planet with these plants and these songs and these myths and dreams and hopes and stories and skills. I want us to be whole and intact with our ancient traditions of healing and celebrating and mourning. And the only way we are going to be able to do this is to take care of each other. End quote.

Williams writes of the ultimate dream she holds for her child, thus modeling what it means to take up Boggs' radical call to co-construct new realities. This echoes June Jordan's radical call to honor youth's dreams with our lives.

Continuing in this Black feminist lineage, Williams offers a wish, a prayer, and a form of guidance that can anchor us in our collective work. She speaks of the practices of care that must imbue our approach, not only to children, but to the entire world. We have no time or energy for anything less amid the many storms and fires that rage and continue to await us.

Queering Families aspires to contribute to this vision and to traverse the vast gulfs between the awe and hope of our children and a dawning sense of dread over an increasing uninhabitable world. I thus write with everything on the line, well aware that most parents throughout history have never had a guarantee about their children's futures. This feels especially poignant as I humbly reflect on

upon the legacies of parents who have always brought children into worlds riddled by slavery, genocide, apocalypse, war, worlds ablaze. Gaza, we will never forget.

Hope is an insistence upon prefiguring the futures our children deserve through a fierce engagement with the present that opens into endless possibility. Current organizers speak of hope as a discipline and a collective practice. Hope for one's children, it occurs to me, entails an unflinching commitment to sharing the intimate and immediate present with our children.

This requires a dedication to cohabitate their worlds, which have yet to be curtailed by the harsh stories of a future already foreclosed. Love compels us toward a future, even as we wander through the wreckage. Children bring into our lives a reverence for and belief in the miraculous, offering a window into a transformed world, the fitting future generations that we must build if we want it to become manifest."

Quote, if we keep this world spinning and remain upon it long enough, Audre Lorde writes, the future belongs to us and our children because we are fashioning it with a view rooted in humanity, excuse me, rooted in human possibility and growth, a vision that does not shrivel before adversity, end quote. This book is my attempt to do just that.

That is so beautiful. Thank you so much for joining us to talk about your work, Mari. Thank you so much. It was really meaningful and I appreciated our exchange very much.