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my siblings desire a relationship with our parents. i realized that was the missing variable in the quantum equation of our family: desire. each of us have specific desires that we’re operating from, and mine is not for a relationship with my parents.
my desire? that my dad take care of my mom’s material and physical needs as she has done for him for decades. the reality is that he’s incapable of doing so, for many reasons. so i’ll do it myself. and that’s where my desire for nuclearized family ends.
when we are able to imagine and desire different family structures that decenter the ego of men and uphold all humans within it as first class members regardless of gender, genitalia, orientation, or age, we will be able to reshape how our societies move power.
power is the ability to create change, and empire’s equations for family consistently removes power from anyone who is not the male head, so that when that male head is objectively unfit for the position, there is no ability (or authority) to create change. you are stuck.
women can’t change their statuses in abusive marriages without difficulty, and men can’t let their egos rest without fear. and the children. my god. the children carry trauma collected from the fallout for the rest of their lives.
so what does a family look like outside of colonial imaginations? what do you even call it. how do you protect it. how do we start building it. because that is what i desire. fellowship. friendship. intimacy. and the ability to create change without fear.
i think it's interesting that folx are leaning into men as the betrayers of their positions of power here, for good reason, but... https://twitter.com/wazobiann/status/1334903842509520899
what i want to make clear is that *even when* men honor the position of power and are good patriarchs, we are still locked into a colonial imagination of family that excludes deviant humans.
and that all humans are capable of the violence of exclusion that sends people away from home and into the streets for makeshift family. countless stories abound of mothers kicking out queer children, of unlooking sexual abuse, of not believing children for the sake of family.
women will contort themselves into the shape of a thing that can be married, wify'd, claimed, just to grasp the power of the label Mrs but the colonial structure of family does not bend for queer and trans and deviant margins. we are all complicit.
fathers are easy, obvious targets of criticism, but we all participate in this in one form or another.
do you know how powerful it is for a woman to be seen as partnered to a man? and we all desire power in one form or another, so we get it where we can. what i am saying is that i want the kind of power that does not destroy lives and re-traumatize generations.
because the state, the empire itself, is the familial structure at the macro level. if we want to dismantle that, we have to reorganize our families.
if power is the ability to create change, then politics is the struggle for power and, therefore, the personal is a struggle for the ability to create change. we must redefine how we do family if we want to change the world.
we won't do this overnight. we have to make the radical community and fellowship of humans irresistible to the rest of the world, first. and that's what we'll do, one restructured and expanded family at a time.
