#[ 🌟 family 🌟 ]

[peachiiwren]

Happy Damianya Week '24, courtesy of @damianya-week!

Day 1: Prom

They're just hanging

[glade-constellation]

I think I will forever be fucked up over the treatment of the wolf brothers in Sweet Tooth s3. They were kids.

[kuzcoskingdom]

The Emperor's New School || one gifset per episode ↳ Episode 03 ☀︎ Kuzco Fever

[behindthecrowns]

PS: I couldn't believe my eyes when I found this photo!

#Queen Victoria smiling

[homonationalist]

At present, it is standard among practically all communities to fête the family as a bastion of relative safety from state persecution and market coercion, and as a space for nurturing subordinated cultural practices, languages, and traditions. But this is not enough of a reason to spare the family. Frustratedly, Hazel Carby stressed the fact (for the benefit of her white sisters) that many racially, economically, and patriarchally oppressed people cleave proudly and fervently to the family. She was right; nevertheless, as Kathi Weeks puts it: “the model of the nuclear family that has served subordinated groups as a fence against the state, society and capital is the very same white, settler, bourgeois, heterosexual, and patriarchal institution that was imposed by the state, society, and capital on the formerly enslaved, indigenous peoples, and waves of immigrants, all of whom continue to be at once in need of its meagre protections and marginalized by its legacies and prescriptions” (emphasis mine). The family is a shield that human beings have taken up, quite rightly, to survive a war. If we cannot countenance ever putting down that shield, perhaps we have forgotten that the war does not have to go on forever.

This is why Paul Gilroy remarked in his 1993 essay “It’s A Family Affair,” “even the best of this discourse of the familialization of politics is still a problem.” Gilroy is grappling with the reality that, in the United Kingdom as in the United States, the state’s constant disrespect of the Black home and transgression of Black households’ boundaries, as well as its disproportionate removal of Black children into the foster-care industry, understandably inspires an urgent anti-racist politics of “familialization” in defense of Black families. Both the British and American netherworlds of supposedly “broken” homes (milieus that are then exoticized, and seen as efflorescing creatively against all odds), have posed an obstinate threat to the legitimacy of the family regime simply by existing, Gilroy suggests. The paradox is that the “broken” remnant sustains the bourgeois regime insofar as it supplies the culture, inspiration, and oftentimes the surrogate care labor that allows the white household to imagine itself as whole. As a dialectician, “I want to have it both ways,” writes Gilroy, closing out his essay. “I want to be able to valorize what we can recover, but also to cite the disastrous consequences that follow when the family supplies the only symbols of political agency we can find in the culture and the only object upon which that agency can be seen to operate. Let us remind ourselves that there are other possibilities.

There are other possibilities! Traces of the desire for them can be found in Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara)’s anthology The Black Woman, published in America in 1970, not long after the publication of the US labor secretariat’s “Moynihan report,” The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The open season on the Black Matriarch was in full swing. And certainly not all of the anthology’s feminists, in their valiant effort to beat back societal anti-maternal sentiment (matrophobia) and the hatred of Black women specifically (more recently known as “misogynoir”), make the additional step of criticizing familism within their Black communities. But one or two contributors do flatly reject the notion that the family could ever be a part of Black (collective human) liberation. Kay Lindsey, in her piece “The Black Woman as a Woman,” lays out her analysis that: “If all white institutions with the exception of the family were destroyed, the state could also rise again, but Black rather than white.” In other words: the only way to ensure the destruction of the patriarchal state is for the institution of the family to be destroyed. “And I mean destroyed,” echoes the feminist women’s health center representative Pat Parker in 1980, in a speech she delivered at ¡Basta! Women’s Conference on Imperialism and Third World War in Oakland, California. Parker speaks in the name of The Black Women’s Revolutionary Council, among other organizations, and her wide- ranging statement (which addresses imperialism, the Klan, and movement- building) purposively ends with the family: “As long as women are bound by the nuclear family structure we cannot effectively move toward revolution. And if women don’t move, it will not happen.” The left, along with women especially of the upper and middle classes, “must give up ... undying loyalty to the nuclear family,” Parker charges. It is “the basic unit of capitalism and in order for us to move to revolution it has to be destroyed.”

Forty years later, the British writer Lola Olufemi is among those reminding us that there are other possibilities: “abolishing the family...” she tweets, “that’s light work. You’re crying over whether or not Engels said it when it’s been focal to black studies/black feminism for decades.” For Olufemi as for Parker and Lindsey, abolishing marriage, private property, white supremacy, and capitalism are projects that cannot be disentangled from one another. She is no lone voice, either. Annie Olaloku-Teriba, a British scholar of “Blackness” in theory and history, is another contemporary exponent of the rich Black family-abolitionist tradition Olufemi names. In 2021, Olaloku-Teriba surprised and unsettled some of her followers by publishing a thread animated by a commitment to the overthrow of “familial relations” as a key goal of her antipatriarchal socialism. These posts point to the striking absence of the child from contemporary theorizations of patriarchal domesticity, and criticize radicals’ reluctance to call mothers who “violently discipline [Black] boys into masculinity” patriarchal. “The adult/child relation is as central to patriarchy as ‘man’/‘woman,’” Olaloku-Teriba affirms: “The domination of the boy by the woman is a very routine and potent expression of patriarchal power.” These observations reopen horizons. What would it mean for Black caregivers (of all genders) not to fear the absence of family in the lives of Black children? What would it mean not to need the Black family?

Sophie Lewis in “Abolish Which Family?” from Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, 2022.

[lilacerull0]

number 1 advice for taking exams ummm have a glass of beer beforehand

[lumism]

making sure there's gay imagery in the back of the photos i post on instagram like i'm a set designer for a scene that features mike wheeler

[tetzoro]

good morning friendz and yappy saturday !!!! i hope today is a wonderful day for everyone !! try to take it easy and be gentle with yourselves ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ̀ˋwe all deserve a lil break !! 🤍💫

[brokenstarwishes]

.... I... um.......

.......I can get pretty upset when I run out of lives in candy crush actually, Siffrin.

it'd be nice to have someone to help calm me down.... relieve the stress...

(I'm just giggling about the idea of this being over candy crush-)

( You Kindly push your jerk of a host away from your console )

Iii I,,, wwould,,, hhelp. If yyoud want that?

ii imean relieve,,, stress,,, ii i can be pretty good at being an outlet,,,

for that...

////

( You sound ridiculous. Stars why cant you flirt. )

[accultant]

❝ Ia . . . Why did Dandy just call me his mom ？❞

Iago glances up from braiding Thistle's hair, holding a ribbon in their teeth while they work.

“Prob-ly -cause-” They stop, hold up a finger, take the ribbon out to tie off the black, curly end of their daughter's hair and speak clearly, “Probably because you're his mom.” 

“And my aunt..?” Thistle says quietly, tilting her head up and backwards to look at Iago for confirmation with those big ole' eyes of hers. 

They tickle her nose with the end of her own braid instead of giving a surefire answer and start to usher her away while she giggles, “Shoo. Go play with your cousin. And tell him if he tugs out your ribbon again, Auntie Iago is going to put one in his hair next. The gaudiest color I can find.” 

When Thistle skips off, looking concerningly delighted by the prospect of threatening Dandy, Iago scoots over and tugs Puck down onto the couch next to them.

“Because you're his mom,” they say again, poking him in the side before asking a little more seriously, “Does it bother you?” 

[termagax]

[kuzcoskingdom]

you know what, as funny and iconic as the scene where kuzco pretends to be pacha's wife is, sometimes i wish they did not include it simply because maybe without that scene more people would realize that pacha is intentionally written as kuzco's father figure. or idk maybe nothing would change and people would still miss the point of the movie even without it. sigh.

[cedar-sunshine]

my boys are so comically intertwined. They're two halves of one whole but it wasn't a neat split, they're torn remnants of what could have been a person and there's pieces missing and things that they picked up but they're both roughly half of a whole, not cut nearly, but torn apart by hand, sorted into mismatched piles. They were always supposed to be together and they will do everything in their power to avoid this until it happens. It's not sun and moon symbolism, its life and death, day and night, the same font saying two reflected things. They're interchangeable and complete opposites and the exact same

[lumism]

if you ever need to cry on cue remember that in the first episode joyce instinctively reaches over to ruffle will's hair but he isn't there so she just clenches her hand in empty air👍

[homonationalist]

The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (from here on referred to as The Report), known in popular vernacular as The Moynihan Report (1965), celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2015. In 1965, amidst a backdrop of Black urban rebellion, Moynihan’s anxiety about the crumbling fabric of the negro family headed by the Black matriarch inspired his characterization of the black family as a “tangle of pathology.” Alongside the sociologist’s attempts to police and surveil unruly Black urban life through producing the ‘Black family’ as an object of knowledge and problem for national security, Moynihan also reaffirmed the family as the singular epistemic mode of knowing and regulating the self and American (or US) civil society. Moynihan affirmed for the United States that, “The family is the basic social unit of American life.”

Since The Report’s publication, Black scholars and activists have felt compelled to respond to The Report and its legacy that has marked Black single mothers, Black genders, sexualities and family formations as self (and nationally) destructive. Since its introduction into mainstream public discourse in 1965 the Black Matriarch has embedded itself in the US imaginary in an almost archetypal fashion. In fact it has become the primary discourse used to both imagine and speak about the ‘Black family’ specifically as a problem and thus an object of disquiet. Black academic ‘feminists’ and Black women activists have critiqued both Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s and Black bourgeois attempts to castigate Black female headed households as perverse and deviant. Black feminists have labored to illumine the ways that the “controlling image” of the Black matriarch forecloses upon the possibility of imagining viable non-nuclear family formations, vilifies Black single female sexual autonomy, reinforces an ethos of personal responsibility and disavows structural inequality making it almost impossible to imagine a politics of redistribution. To date, Black feminist and queer scholarship continues to propose Black matriarchal, non-heteropatriarchal and queer models of affirming Black family life in an attempt to counter the legacy of pathologization left by The Report.

However, after fifty years of ever-evolving and increasingly nuanced Black feminist responses to The Report, rarely do critiques and alternative modes of the Black filial interrogate the viability of the notion of the family itself. While, Black feminist responses to The Report and the discourse of Black matriarchy have argued for alternative forms of family, ranging from intergenerational, extended, non-sanguial, and queer; the family as a sociological unit and as a self evident and natural form of human organization persists. Even when Black and Black queer feminists call for alternatives to the the ‘normal family,’ these modifications and revisions to the family still retain attachments to the liberal humanistic concept of the filial as the organizing frame for legible Black collective life.

Black ‘feminist’ abolitionist responses that trouble the very concept of the family as a way of organizing Black life still remain unexamined and perhaps even “unthought.” In this essay, I argue that while most Black feminist and queer modes of critique exhibit a suspicion or ambivalence toward the family, the responses of Kay Lindsey (1970) and Hortense Spillers (1987) offer a distinctly abolitionist critique of the family. Unlike “suspicious” or reformist critiques, which tend to hold onto at least some aspects of the normative and liberal family model, the abolitionist frame organizing this essay opens up the possibility of naming and doing Black relations outside of the categories that currently name humanness. This essay focuses on Black abolitionist critiques that denaturalize the family as a normative and humanizing institution to which people should aspire to belong. More importantly, it opens up conversations about alternative modes of naming the self in relation to others outside of the Western humanist tradition.

Because of the ongoing disruption of Black sociality and the understanding that Black relations are under assault, the ‘Black family’ has taken on an almost sacred significance within Black social life due to its heralded role as a protective mechanism to Black vulnerability and violation. The Black praxis of family as an everyday lived experience has the potential to ground people, provide material and emotional support and affirm the spirit of many Black people who feel vulnerable in the world. For many, including myself, family helps make life livable amidst everyday enactments of antiblack violence. To be clear, this essay does not indulge in a nihilistic destruction of the family for the sake of Afro-pessimistic intellectual experimentation. Rather, it is precisely because of this need for and commitment to Black sociality as a dynamic and inventive practice that this essay presses toward otherwise modes of thinking and being with one another. This essay conscientiously attends to the ways that the western notion of the family functions as a site of violence and dehumanization that threatens to engulf Black sociality. While Black feminist, queer scholarship and creative work have called for a reimagining of the Black family on radically different terms (non patriarchal, egalitarian and queer) they often do not critique the family in ways that draw attention to the violent ways that the family emerges as a category of violent forms of humanism. I consider the possible abolition of the family (and Black family) because I fear that the institution crowds out the dynamic and emerging ways that Black people reimagine and invent new modes of relation.

Tiffany Lethabo King from “Black 'Feminisms' and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan's Negro Family”

[brokenstarwishes]

Hey, Siffrin. Can I kiss you?

(Ack!! Theyve caught you off guard when you don't have your phoneful of sprites!!!)

I uhm I ah- I- S-sure??? I suppose so ////