Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary

Frances Bartkowski

Published by Columbia University Press 2008

Kissing Cousins

A New Kinship Bestiary

Frances Bartkowski

https://doi.org/10.7312/bart14452

Overview
Contents

About this book

Since DNA has replaced blood as the medium through which we establish kinship, how do we determine with whom we are kin? Who counts among those we care for? The distinction between these categories is constantly in flux. How do we come to decide those we may kiss and those we may kill?

Focusing on narratives of kinship as they are defined in contemporary film, literature, and news media, Frances Bartkowski discusses the impact of "stories of origin" on our regard for nonhuman species. She locates the role of "totems and taboos" in forming and re-forming kinship categories-groupings that enable us to tie the personal to the social-and explores the bestiary, among the oldest of literary forms. The bestiary is the realm in which we allegorize the place of humans and other species, a menagerie encompassing animals we know as well as human-animal chimeras and other beings that challenge the "natural" order of the world. Yet advances in reproductive technologies, the mapping of genomes, and the study of primates continually destabilize these categories and recast the dynamic between the natural and the cultural.

Bartkowski highlights the arbitrariness of traditional kinship arrangements and asks us to rethink our notions of empathy and ethics. She shows how current dialogues concerning ethics and desire determine contemporary attitudes toward issues of care, and suggests a new framework for negotiating connection and conflict.

Author / Editor information

Frances Bartkowski is associate professor of English and women's studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Feminist Utopias and Travelers and Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement, and the coeditor of Feminist Theory: A Reader.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Prologue: Remember the 2,000-Year-Old Man? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	5
Part II Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Part III Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
Epilogue: Here Come the Cavemen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Works Consulted Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 224
Illustrations
- Other: 5 illus.

eBook

Published: September 18, 2008
ISBN: 9780231517638