Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway (eds.), Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18593
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2038-3460
18593
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en
Michela Cozza
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Angela Balzano, Antonia Anna Ferrante and Federica Timeto (eds.), Making Kin. Fare parentele, non popolazioni, DeriveApprodi, 2022
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Book Reviews
2024-01-16
2023-12-06
2024-01-16
2024-01-16
121-125
TS
Michela Cozza
2023
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18593
121
Mälardalen University
2038-3460
2
en
125
Angela Balzano, Antonia Anna Ferrante and Federica Timeto (eds.), Making Kin. Fare parentele, non popolazioni, DeriveApprodi, 2022
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/18593/17030
14
T/S                                                                                      BOOK REVIEWS



Making Kin. Fare parentele, non popolazioni
[Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations]
by Angela Balzano, Antonia Anna Ferrante and Federica Timeto (eds.) (2022) Bologna,
DeriveApprodi, pp. 240 [Italian translation and editing].
by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway (eds.) (2018) Cambridge, Prickly Paradigm Press, pp. 209.




Michela Cozza
Mälardalen University


   I am sitting in the company of my notebook with Making Kin Not Population, edited by
Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway on one side and Making Kin. Fare parentele, non popolazioni
– the Italian translation edited by Angela Balzano, Antonia Ferrante and Federica Timeto – on
the other. In this more-than-human gathering, I silently admire these two shining examples
of collegial debate and respectful disagreement joining together in an antiracist, anticolonial,
feminist polyphony. The conversation that I “heard” while reading the books makes my task
particularly challenging. The result may be situated between a book review and an act of ac-
ademic activism echoing these two books. Although the second book is the translation of the
first, it is not just that: this translation is a political act and I want to honor it as such, along with
its source of inspiration. If scholars – at least in Science and Technology Studies – agree that
objects agentially affect us “humans”, this certainly applies to my relationship with these books
that affect me deeply as a feminist scholar, as a heterosexual, white, middle-aged and relatively
privileged migrant woman, and – relevant enough to say in relation to these books – as a mother
of two. While presenting the book by Clarke and Haraway, in the following I link it to Balzano,
Ferrante, and Timeto’s book and specifically to their Afterword (pp. 183-196) where they frame
their translation and act of translating. Indeed, the Afterword is the only chapter in the Italian
translation of Clarke and Haraway’s book where Balzano, Ferrante and Timeto’s voices emerge.
   Critical and appreciative reviews have been already published on Clarke and Haraway’s
work (for example Appleton and Glabau 2022; Dow and Lamoreaux 2020; Strathern et al.
2019), which includes – along with an Introduction by Clarke – five essays by scholars based
in North America (Ruha Benjamin, Donna Haraway, Michelle Murphy, Kim TallBear) and
one by two coauthors based in Taiwan (Yu-Ling Huang and Chia-Ling Wu). The volume
addresses a North American audience by entwining the contributions around five major cate-
gories – feminism, reproduction, population, environment, and kin. “Population” and “kin”
are given prominence, both in the original title and in its Italian translation, which – in the
subtitle – purposefully uses the plural “popolazioni” (“populations”) to stress the plurality of

C
TE NOSCIENZA. taI lian Journal of Science & eT chnology tudiS es        © The Author(s) 2023
  14(2) p. 125- ISN 2038-46                                             Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
       DOI: 10.692/i/18593sn.20-46                                      www.tecnoscienza.net
Cozza                                                                                              122

human and nonhuman beings to make kin with. “Making” is equally crucial to appreciating
the book. As Balzano, Ferrante, and Timeto highlight in their Afterword, generative intersec-
tions require a “doing”, or, rather a “making” through caring practices across species (hence,
the environmental theme) rather than the exclusive generation of new life (i.e., reproduc-
tion). Banu Subramaniam (2018) brilliantly summarize that Making Kin Not Population:

     resurrects overpopulation as a question for feminism […] Clarke and Haraway make clear
     that the solution is not about controlling women but promoting the idea of kin. Femi-
     nists, they argue, should promote a world where we make family through lateral networks
     of friendship and community of nonbiologically related individuals (i.e., kin), rather than
     increase the global population numbers by promoting traditional families based on biolog-
     ically related offspring through reproduction (i.e., population).

   The authors of Clarke and Haraway’s book – who all have been involved and implicated
in issues of intimacy and kinship for decades – do not discuss them homogeneously, but dif-
ferently embed their feminist activism into engaged political analyses of controversial topics.
What keeps these authors united is the belief that “population control strategies and policies
are by definition anti-woman hence anti-feminist, and that reproductive justice, environmental
degradation and climate change are urgent feminist issues” (p. 34, italics in the original). In this
book, the authors offer vital proposals to reconceive generations – as the English subtitle reads.
   In the Introduction, Adele Clarke provides some background to appreciate the “interven-
tion” (p. 1) – as she calls Making Kin Not Population. In this regard, to my surprise, Balzano,
Ferrante, and Timeto paraphrase “intervention” with a more didactic incipit (in Italian “Il
tema centrale…”), which, in my view, weakens the militant ethos of the original incipit. In
fact, Balzano, Ferrante, and Timeto’s overall gesture is political, and it is itself an intervention
addressing an Italian audience at a time of ecological, social, and global crises and, moreover,
when the pro-life and pro-family rightwing Giorgia Meloni government took office. Let me
come back to this later. Clarke explains that the booklet was born from the intention to pro-
vide a collaborative response to the “blooming silence” of feminist STS on the urgent need to
reduce “the human burden on earth while strengthening ecojustice for people and other critters
as means and not just ends” (p. 4; italics in the original). These words first appeared in Clarke
and Haraway’s abstract for a session held at the 2015 meetings of the Society for Social Stud-
ies of Science. The session attracted two hundred people and motivated Clarke and Haraway
to pursue this book by inviting other brilliant scholars to join.
   Ruha Benjamin, in Black AfterLives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Jus-
tice (Chapter 1), examines the relationship between race, reproduction, kinship and feminist
imaginaries, and elaborates on the idea of “kinfulness” as reproductive justice. Although sub-
ordination, subjugation, subaltern relations and racialization cannot be disjoined from the
idea of Black Afterlives, Benjamin points out that there is much more than that; “there is a lot
happening underground. Not only coffins, but seeds, roots and rhizomes” (p. 47). Afterlives
of past generations sustain future lives by enacting a practice of making kin “beyond biologi-
cal relatives, but also with the materially dead/spiritually alive ancestors in our midst” (p. 48,
italics in the original). In their Afterword, Balzano, Ferrante, and Timeto make us aware of
123                                                                      Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

the care they put into translating words like “black” and “blackness” (they use “ner*” and
“nerezza”) and “of color” (translated with “di colore”), while keeping in English the word
“brown” in consideration – as they explain – of what literature says on the matter and in
order to generate “a [political] space and language the Italian speaking racialized subjectivities
can identify with” (p. 188, my translation).
   Donna Haraway’s Making Kin in the Chthulucene: Reproducing Multispecies Justice
(Chapter 2) is “a plea for other-than-biogenetic kindred” (p. 69) that she articulates not with-
out pain caused by the unjust “state-race-sex-resource-colony-and-capital-making apparatus-
es of counting and inventorying” (p. 70). Her chapter is inhabited by two “populations”: the
Born – the “multi-billions of human beings, industrial food animals, and companion pets
enterprised up to mega consumer status” (p. 35) – and the Disappeared – the literally dis-
appeared, extinct, invisible, murdered or never-conceived, unborn beings – who, however,
are a matter of reproductive justice and freedom. Haraway situates them at a time she calls
“Chthulucene,” which requires sym-poiesis, or making-with or becoming-with, rather than
auto-poiesis or self-making through the appropriation of everything as a resource. Such a
view is common to the best scientific knowledge practices “foregrounding relationalities and
not individual or massed countables” (p. 84). Resonating with Haraway’s discussion of the
trouble with counting, Balzano, Ferrante, and Timeto in their Afterword point out the differ-
ence between the transitive and intransitive Italian verb “contare”, translatable as “counting”
(transitive) and “mattering” (intransitive): counting (in the sense of inventorying) is always a
political practice of including and excluding or making some bodies matter and others not (in
the general sense of being significant, valued, and important). Karen Barad (2007) – who is
not mobilized by any of the authors – would refer to the practice of cutting together/apart to
describe the differentiated mattering of the bodies as an inevitable consequence of practices
of counting life/bodies. We may also recall the foundational STS work of Bowker and Star
(2000) on the practice of classification and its consequences.
   In Against Population, Towards Alterlife (Chapter 3), Michelle Murphy has a different use
of the word “population” compared to Haraway’s and Clarke’s use. While the latter two are
committed to population as a central problem associated with the growing human numbers,
Murphy “takes a position against population as a framework for a feminist politics while still
elevating the question of reproductive politics in feminist decolonial environmental justice”
(p. 101). She reminds us that “population as a concept is enmeshed in the very infrastructures
and logics that have produced ubiquitous environmental violence” (p. 106). Instead, she brings
“reproductive justice” to the center to sustain community beyond biology. Her rejection of the
concept “population” – as highlighted by Balzano, Ferrante, and Timeto in their Afterword –
allows her to avoid colluding with capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy and heteropatriar-
chy. Far from a mere critic, Murphy opens a critical path “for a politics of differently distributed
futures” (p. 111). She proposes the concept of “alterlife – the struggle to exist again but differ-
ently when already in conflicted, damaging and deadly conditions, a state of already having been
altered, of already being in the aftermath, and yet persisting” (p. 113, italics in the original).
   Yu-Ling Huang and Chia-Ling Wu, in New Feminist Biopolitics in Ultra-low-fertility East
Asia (Chapter 4), talk of innovative living possibilities supporting nonbiologically related peo-
ple, for example, in intergenerational relationships. Huang and Wu remind us that “[f]eminist
Cozza                                                                                         124

STS perspectives center the importance of investigating technoscience to untangle biopolitics”
(p. 128, emphasis mine) which have materialized, for example, in the intrauterine devices in
Taiwan and South Korea, abortion in Japan, or sterilization in China. In their Afterword,
Balzano, Ferrante, and Timeto highlight that those are necropolitical dispositives. In contem-
porary critical theory, biopolitics and necropolitics are two sides of the same coin, allowing us
to analyze power relations and examine the inextricable politics of life and death. To biopolitics
and necropolitics, Huang and Wu oppose practices of remaking demography by integrating
concerns about the environment, reconceptualizing aging and intergenerational relationships,
and taking gender into account in the very conceptualization of the population crisis.
   Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family by Kim TallBear (Chapter 5)
explores traditional conceptions of family through the affective dimensions of love and fa-
milial relations amid settler colonialism. Settler sexuality and family constructs have made
both land and humans – women, children, and lovers, for example – into property. TallBear
urges an alternative to the monogamist, heteronormative, marriage-focused, nuclear family
ideal that, in the U.S., disciplined Indigenous and queer people. A strategy for making kin
otherwise relies on thinking relationally about sexuality as a relational power exchange. In
their Afterword, Balzano, Ferrante, and Timeto help us see TallBear’s invitation to queer inti-
mate relationships as a call to exercise our imagination and vision toward caring relationships
other than normative models of kinship ties and obligations. Allow me to link TallBear’s
contribution to the Italian context – the same that Balzano, Ferrante, and Timeto address
in translating the book. I am writing this book review just after the premature passing of the
Sardinian writer, playwright, blogger, commentator and literary critic Michela Murgia. She
bravely and wisely turned her disease, and eventually her death, into a political situation to
create a public debate on queering the traditional idea of family and sexuality. She strongly
believed in the right of the “will” (in Latin: Ius Voluntatis) or “making kin” according to the
principle of free choice. In Murgia’s life, such an ethos found its maximum expression in
building and making public her queer family with those she called her own “soul children"
(from the Sardinian “fillus/as de ànima”; see Murgia’s novel Accabadora) to describe those
whom she – as a “soul mother” – helped to accompany on their journey towards adulthood
regardless of any biological bonds but, rather, based on a sincere desire to grow up together.
Among others, Murgia’s queer family included her dearest friend married “in articulo mortis”
(that is, “at the point of death”) due to the fact that the Italian legal system lacks a formal
acknowledgement of queer bonds as sufficient to legitimize the “family” status. She married
him as a trusted person to delegate decisions if needed at the point of death. In my reading
of TallBear’s proposals, I found a resemblance to Murgia’s open family, made up of people
linked together not necessarily by blood ties. Much more could be said but I refer the readers
to the books I am reviewing, including Murgia’s novel (2012[2009]).
   To conclude, translating is (always) to betray and – luckily! – Balzano, Ferrante, and Time-
to did no less. They fully honored the depth and linguistic complexity of Clarke and Hara-
way’s edited book while, in the Afterword, they turned Clarke and Haraway’s “intervention”
into a political gesture of their own. They did so by articulating their own positioning in re-
lation to the book, its translation, the broader literature on the subject matter and the Italian
context. As we understand by reading these final pages, they share with all authors of Making
125                                                                      Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

Kin Not Population a feminist intellectual activism that the Italian audience could recognize
at the meeting Making Kin. Reproductive Justice is Eco-justice, held on October 28, 2022, at
the Ca’ Foscari Theater. This event, sponsored by the New Institute Centre for Environmen-
tal Humanities, brought Ferrante and Timeto (Balzano was not present) in conversation with
Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway, who attended online. On that occasion, the Italian au-
thors brought the book down to the national political scenario and took an explicit position
against the Meloni government actions (Undisciplined Environments, 2022).
   If anything, I would have loved to listen to Balzano’s, Ferrante’s, and Timeto’s voices more
in the book, for example with an Introduction contextualizing the translation of the book
and enhancing its connection with Italian literature and research. It would have been another
way to make kin in an academic landscape deeply in need of thinking otherwise and letting its
seeds, roots, and rhizomes flourish.


References

Appleton, Nayantara Sheoran and Glabau, Danya (2022) Critical engagements on Making Kin not
   Population: An epistolary review essay, in “American Anthropologist”, 124, pp. 891-899.
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
   and Meaning, Durham, Duke University Press.
Bowker, Geoffrey and Star, Susan Leigh (1999) (2000) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its
   Consequences, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press.
Dow, Katharine and Lamoreaux, Janelle (2020) Situated Kinmaking and the Population “Problem”, in
   “Environmental Humanities”, 12(2), pp. 475-491.
Murgia, Michela (2012[2009]) Accabadora (Silvester Mazzarella, Translation), New York, Penguin
   Random House.
Strathern, Marilyn, Sasser, Jade S., Clarke, Adele, Benjamin, Ruha, TallBear, Kim, Murphy, Michelle,
   Haraway, Donna, Huang, Yu-Ling and Wu, Chia-Ling (2019) Forum on making Kin Not
   Population: Reconceiving Generations, in “Feminist Studies”, 45(1), pp. 159-172.
Subramaniam, Banu (2018, November 27) “Overpopulation” is not the problem. Public Books. Avail-
   able at: https://www.publicbooks.org/top-10-2019-overpopulation-is-not-the-problem/ (retrieved
   on August 18, 2023).
Undisciplined Environments (2022, December 15) Make Kin, Fight Fascism. Undisciplined
   Environments. Available at: https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2022/12/15/make-kin-fight-
   fascism/ (retrieved on August 17, 2023).
