Dies ist ein persönlicher Text. Er ist vorläufiges Resultat eines andauernden Gesprächs, zu dessen Beginn eine Beziehungskrise stand. Eine von uns hat sich in jemand anderen verliebt. Anstatt gemeinsam ein Kind zu bekommen, sind wir nun auf eine andere Weise zu dritt.
We have compiled and annotated an incomplete reading list on and around the family, the body, and the technologies connected to it, care, labor and communality. Shared reading becomes common writing and creates leaks in our respective artistic and curatorial practices, asking how can we assist each other through the violence of a patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist understanding of the family, care, education, and health, as we have increasingly experienced it over the past year?
The representation of the figure of the mother has, until womxn have more recently taken up the task, been rather limited. This essay explores the persistence of a complex node of thoughts and images linked to this particular body and, closely (and literally) related to it, the entity of the family. It looks at works by Lea Lublin, Mary Kelly, Juliette Blightman, Catherine Opie and Ree Morton, among others, as well as at two – very different – books: Shulamith Firestone’s radical feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex (1970), which calls for the abolishment of the child-bearing mother, and with her the nuclear family; and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), a personal account of becoming a mother in a queer family. All of these works challenge steadfast taboos surrounding the figure of the mother, and ask, each from a particular standpoint: Can the maternal subject be radical?
Drawing on her book Full Surrogacy Now, Sophie Lewis revisits the figure of Shulamith Firestone from a critical transfeminist perspective to pursue the idea that paid and unpaid human gestational labor alike constitute forms of work under capitalism that gestators themselves can seek to abolish. This essay originated as a lecture and discussion organized by Rose-Anne Gush and Barbara Kapusta in November 2020 as part of their «Feminism against Family» program at mumok Vienna.
In 2003, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published the essay «Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading. Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You» as part of the anthology Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. In it, Sedgwick asks why Western critique operates mostly with paranoid readings, readings that aim to expose hidden violent structures, and suggests a «reparative» approach that focusses not only on what is being written, or said, or done but how and to what end. The text was a starting point for Geraldine Tedder’s essay «You Are Probably Completely Oblivious That This Text Actually Is About You» and will kick off a series of texts in line with Sedgwick’s thinking as to what it might or might not mean to read and write «reparatively».
