On the Trouble with Making Kin

In light of the proliferation of scholarly investments in imagining otherwise forms of kinship and worlding, this article confronts feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway’s speculative monograph Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene with the natal alienation of the slave in order to intervene in critiques of social reproduction that posit transformative kinship as inherently liberatory or redressive of structural violence. Through symptomatic readings of Haraway’s Camille stories and Octavia Butler’s “neo-slave” novel Kindred, the article interrogates the role that speculative imaginaries play in rearticulating the social order, specifically concerning anti-Blackness. I argue that gestational violence—a metaphorical and (dis)embodying violence that brings being(s) to form both conceptually and conceptively—is the key creative force through which society renews its modes of relation and stabilizes the symbolic order. Without anti-Black violence, material reproduction (of bodies, of being, of society) cannot continue.