Wyoming

I was conceived in Wyoming. ‘I remember we had to climb two flights of stairs,’¹ she told me. Another time she talks about taking the lift. I prompt her; the lift, or the stairs? ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember, it was so long ago!’² I take the stairs to the second floor. She definitely took the lift, I tell myself as the door to the surgery appears. The waiting room is quite apart from the soft crescendos of the cooling system. I am told to take a seat. The conditioned air lifts the heavy paper from my hand for a second. It’s a piece of fiction of the legal genre that I wish to refuse. People used to say, ‘it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of capitalism.’³ But that popular saying was later updated to a phrase suggesting, ‘it might be easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family.’⁴

Family comes from the latin, familia, meaning the servants of a household. The butter dish, the beds, the newspapers, the fridge full of food and the shed with its blowers and Ratsak: contents cohabiting with those who serve. This collection of possessions contributes to making the household work.  In Abolish The Family, Sophie Lewis understands The Family politically as, ‘predicated on the privatisation of that which should be common, on the proprietary concepts of couple, blood, gene and seed—(as) a state institution not a popular organism.’⁵

Etymologically, it is the gene, meaning generation and race, that binds family and kin. Although we understand kin as that which belongs to a broader system of relating, because the word stems from gene, it’s a paradoxically closer relative to our bio-determined, inheritance-driven contemporary notion of what a family is. Kin, pre-epigenetic almost, is more expansive than bio-dad, but has not done away with bio-dad, yet. Kith, though, reaches beyond both ways of communing. Kith is friends, the land and the more-than-human.⁶ What if us, could come to mean all of us, rather than the few under one private roof?

I asked her, ‘was it a syringe, or a sort of long tube thing?’ ‘It was more like a syringe, yeah,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t taking much notice of that.’⁷ AI has been practiced since the late eighteenth century in animals and from the early twentieth century in humans.⁸ I want to die with my dog, although time probably will not allow it. It was a cocker spaniel who birthed the first AI babies—a litter of seven living puppies. Was she a good puppy mama, licking them all equally, with the requisite amount of tender consistency to guarantee securely attached offspring? Someone said, even though you love them, there are so many ways you can fuck your kids up. I can’t remember who said it, but I know it’s true. Love and violence are catastrophically proximate, they’re way too familiar.

A woman returning to her seat in the waiting area, turns mid-step towards me, mouth slightly ajar in anticipation of a ‘hello’. I reach down and grab a magazine from the coffee table wondering, is it happening again? She stops suddenly and says, ‘sorry, I thought you were someone else.’ It did happen again. Her companion emerges from the corridor, rousing her from the confusion this misrecognition has caused. He raises his arms in celebration, ‘no more diabetes tablets!’⁹

I put the magazine back and unfold my piece of paper. It bears the names of my co-commissioning parents, and me. Butter dish or leaf blower? That’s ridiculous, they loved me! And I love them! Well, one of them. So it goes with kin. I was conceived in Wyoming, before office hours and legislation, at roughly the same time that Michel Foucault was delivering The Birth of Biopolitics, and that Steptoe and Edwards were delivering Louise Brown: SUPERBABE,¹⁰ to an ecstatic, albeit divided mass-media. Although the technologies of co-production that made Louise (IVF), and I (AI-d) differ significantly in material, ethical and legal terms, we plopped into our respective neoliberal crèches, both mobile, infinitely malleable and truly loved human capital.  

‘On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?’ asked Marx and Engels. ‘On capital, on private gain’¹¹ they chime in unison. It’s true, the economy is as intimately linked to the household as its occupants. Economy comes from the ancient Greek, oikonomia, meaning, management of a household or family. Savvy economists yield orderly families. Foucault, also doggedly traced money’s trickle through tender limbs declaring ‘bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism.’¹² The breathing, working, spending, fucking, infinite networks of living economic agents came, every one of them, from a family. M.E O’Brian in Family Abolition: Capitalism and The Communising Of Care, describes the private nuclear family as a unit that operates on two levels of discipline and control;

‘First, the family as a white supremacist normative ideal, imposed through violence, state policy, and cultural norms; second, the terrors within the family, the violences it enables and obscures, the regimes of gender and power it reproduces.’¹³

Insidiously, ‘the far right will often activate the parent identity’¹⁴ as a methodology for demonising systems of care and kinship that fall outside of their ideological framework. It is in the name of the family, that the systematic erosion of the (other/s) family is enacted in order, apparently, to protect the sanctity of the (their) family.

The silence of people waiting dissolves into some sort of history show. It’s about a former prime minister, and she’s listing the achievements resulting from her time in power; she slashed immigration; eradicated employee-centred workplace legislation, the transgender insurgency and independent news media; she abandoned the net zero nonsense, in doing so, allowing the continent’s natural resources to be extracted fully while introducing nuclear energy. She withdrew from the United Nations and decommissioned the National Indigenous Australian Agency. She disassembled the childcare system, rolled back abortion rights and paid parental leave and reintroduced the gender pay gap. She grew the national cake. She put the family first.¹⁵ ‘We are left with isolated domestic units,’ an interviewee reports, ‘overworked parents deprived of extended families, kinship networks and real institutional assistance.’¹⁶

The receptionist calls my name. I have come home to Wyoming—175 Macquarie Street, Gadigal, opposite The State Library of Former New South Wales—to return my forged document in the birth certificate buy-back scheme. It gasps, ‘Oh! We don’t get many supercentenarians. You’re a sentimental bunch.’ ‘Not me!’ I try to argue, but they have already turned to deposit the document into a locked wheelie bin, to be composted as garden-ready blood and bone. Mine was a fiction because I was AI generated; co-produced via Artificial Insemination by anonymous donor. Unlike some of my donor conceived kin, I was always ok with genealogical bewilderment, and I got off on my cyborg heritage; an ‘illegitimate offspring,’ birthed by ‘a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.’¹⁷

There is some confusion about the origin and meaning of abolition. It comes from abolere meaning to destroy, efface or annihilate, but it also stems from adolere: to grow, to nourish. To annihilate, or to nourish? The friendly armies of kithly carers were aware of the interdependency and absolute necessity of deploying both in the post-family-reunification struggle. ‘It’s generative, you’ll see!’ they cried out, hammered by the pepper spray of a pro-lifer’s can. Family abolition is neither anti-natal nor hyper-individualist. Grandmas will never be banished! On the contrary, it yearned for a pro-natality that is raised in solidarity by cohorts of loved ones—including kin both bio and not—rendering the ‘one-person, round-the-clock child-rearing factory’¹⁸ permanently redundant. Brilliant new forms can appear not in spite of, but as the result of enduring devotion to the process of careful destruction. To inhabit the unthinkable space of being together after The Family is to trust that ‘relationship is multiform, at stake, unfinished, consequential,’ ¹⁹ and to honour it as such. They imagined the event of capitalism’s expulsion from the earth as more likely than the disappearance of The Family. But The Family is capitalism, and now we have neither.

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