The Kleinfamilie, or “nuclear family,” endures as a core structure that helps to define human relations. With roots in the eighteenth century, the Kleinfamilie provided a social and economic foundation for the rise of the modern nation state. However, the heterogeneous and multidimensional ways individuals and communities connect with one another today require a broader focus. A more fluid and encompassing term, “kinship,” offers a way of seeing and describing those ties that extend beyond the nuclear family and are by nature shifting and
temporary.

Using kinship as a framework, Heidi Schlipphacke’s book The Aesthetics of Kinship: Form and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century (Bucknell University Press, 2023) reexamines 18th-century German novels and dramas to uncover alternative affinities that are hidden when exclusively considered through the walled-off Kleinfamilie. Sclipphacke’s investigation belongs to a larger body of recent scholarly work seeking to reconceive of repurpose the term “kinship.” For example, Jennifer Evans’s The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship after Fascism (Duke University Press, 2023) deploys kinship as an analytic category to demonstrate how queer and trans people in postwar and contemporary Germany navigated citizenship, love, and public and family life. A broader investigation into kinship, Adele E. Clarke’s and Donna Harraway’s edited volume
Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations (The University of Chicago Press, 2018) contemplates questions of reproductive and environmental justice to
consider how we establish personal and public connections today. Building on recent interventions like these, this conference will approach kinship as an interdisciplinary tool for exploring relational networks and the formation of personal and collective identity within–and in opposition to–“Western,” modern, white, heterosexual, and even anthropocentric norms.