Kinship in the (Un)Making

They play mother-me-do all day. A woman who loves a woman is forever young11. We are at home. O2 and I. We are participating in an online gathering. I share a sweet anecdote of O and I with the group. Someone asks, “Are you, two, mother and daughter?” with affection in her voice. “No,” I say, “we are lovers.” Affection is replaced by loud laughter immediately punctuating the end of the conversation while my answer “we are lovers” lingers in our virtual space. Our relationship status with O is suddenly out in the open, giving hiccups to always-already functioning heteronormative mind. A sense of pride accompanies being gently forced to make a statement about my intimate bond. I know that we are at a safe space. Yet, I also know that erotic love between women always has a surplus value in the language of desire, waiting to be claimed by, be rescued from, and be uttered performatively. This is the queer “bound by the social field we occupy together, the queer that cannot avoid contamination.”3This piece is about those contaminated moments of unintended openings into love between women. They are based on autobiographical moments of voluntarily or momentarily coming out within the cultural and political context of Turkey. Those moments carry an urgent patience in the decision of uncovering a queer bond that is not easily welcomed. Yet, once the conversation unfolds, it is another choice to stay with the ethical space opened by it. How to stay through the silences and maneuvers following queer responses to the question, “Who are you to each other?” How to viscerally welcome those volatile curiosities? How does queer reveal itself in the materiality of voices and bodies? Queer kinship claims its right to blossom and exist in these moments, in the capacity of asking it back: who are we to each other? These moments do not offer a sudden outburst or an eventful transformation. Yet, they emit sparks. They momentarily ease the impossibility in the prevailing thought that erotic love between two women does not exist.2. “I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.” Vocalize this vow out loud at the moment of reading this piece and you will fail in Austin’s terms4 or you will artfully fail in Halberstam’s terms.5 Failing this way or another, this performative utterance has its persistence in the ways in which we practice care in relationships. It defines and repeatedly reinforces an understanding of care that is deprived of structural support systems, an idea of well-being that is conditioned upon individualistic responsibilities. Which further isolates queer relationships that are not enjoying the privileges of public recognition. It becomes an issue to reclaim care in a culture when our terms for it have been overrun by compulsory heterosexuality coupled with marriage at the center of all. “In sickness and in health…” reverberates in my mind during the pandemic while I struggle with my feelings of guilt for being away from O.I tell my mother with whom I stay during the pandemic that I am arranging a one-hour plane trip to see O. My mum hates the idea. She asks, What is it about O that is so important? She wonders why I take such a risk of traveling during a pandemic. I say “because she is my lover, mum.” Once again, lover, the unhappy performative, hangs in the air, sounding not quite right. Care sounds weird and radical, too, when the word lover does not function properly.3. O books a room at a spa hotel by a lake on our relationship anniversary. The hotel is full with families with kids. The dining room is quite large and always packed with people. Yet, I feel strangely alone there. I never like those hotels. I start to reflect on us being there, as a couple in camouflage. Ours is the only table with no kids and men. What is the place of two women having dinner together every evening? Do they see us? Do they hear us? Is there anyone here who can recognize her shiny eyes as I speak to her? Or are we completely invisible, simply mimicking the hom(m)osexual economy6 that this space is made of? The only thing I know for sure is that we eat the same dessert with everyone after the meal and the taste is queerly sweet.Andrea Lou Chang’s rereading of feminism’s never-ending issue with women’s upsetting sexual encounters with men, concludes that affective labor in feminists’ attachment to feminism always contained a struggle with its inherent impossibility.7 Can we similarly reflect on how queer movement turns out to be impossible in its entangled relationship with heterosexism in which “one can only desire as a man?”8 Or on how queering kinship feels impossible in the age where biological kinship is obsessively being controlled by biotechnology such as in vitro fertilization or surrogacy labor market.9 For instance, LİSTAG,10 the solidarity network of families of queers in Turkey, provides an example to how queer desire contaminates kinship by blood, rendering queer kinship both impossible and vital.4. My brother and O were ready to go when I asked them to wait a bit longer because I was on a deadline that day and needed to submit an application before leaving the house. My brother asked the question that is normally addressed by O: “Sister, when are you going to finish it?” I replied, “in ten minutes.” That’s a moment I am used to experiencing all the time with O. She herself told me later in another conversation that she thought it is good that “someone else asked it instead of me this time.” What is kinship for if it is not about sharing the labor of dealing with your partner's annoying aspect(s)?The ways in which we deal with conflict in relationships always call for others’ testimony, presence, and participation. In the privilege of sharing the mundane with others, kinship is entwined around new sensibilities and new bodies, always under negotiation. It is broken, it is repaired, it extends into other relationships. Always in the making, it is giving life to new habits of moving through the world.5. The very fabric of our lifelong bonds could be made of endings, farewells, and closures. Kinship weaves its way in and out most powerfully through the intensities of mourning. In the aftermath of death of a loved one you realize that you are implicated in a cycle of fire; your loved one is also loved by your other loved ones. The fire gets bigger every time a newborn joins the family, an elder dies in the family, a person gets seriously sick in the family. Such emotional labor invested in the familial bonds is the backbone of the very structures that divide us softly. The pull of the kinship becomes the very power that delineates places of belonging in life and beyond death.11Or when a relationship comes to an end. I am thinking when the right moment would be to tell my mother that it is over between me and O. I wonder if she feels the gap, hears the silence that I carry everywhere with me these days. To my surprise, one evening she asks how O is doing. I say it and it becomes real, “though it may look like (Write it!) disaster:”12 It is over, Mum. Her gaze gives me a hug.6. I had been an “open secret”13 for my mother for a long time. She breaks into tears when I openly tell her that O is my lover. Following a stream of why questions aiming for the truest reason, she puts her deepest fear for me in words: “You will never have a real family.” She adds, “That’s what I am sorry for.” She banishes her daughter from all the comfort of having a family.If the intimate act of knowing the other is itself queer,14 in the rejection of the opportunity to know the other must lie the most violent form of oppression. My mother’s conviction that two women cannot have a real family of their own brings memories from Canada. I am at a friend’s place who resides in Okanagan Valley. We are having a lovely dinner. Our host tells us about the reaction of her mother to her newborn baby girl. When she and her partner had a kid, her mother expressed her anxiety concerning two lesbian women touching a baby girl. The nausea travels all over our bodies in the middle of our dinner. The fact that we can sadly relate to the story does not stop it from being a libidokiller.Love will survive queerly. Before and after all break-ups. From mothers or lovers.

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