Performing Family – a Utopian Vision – Nuraishah Shafiq

Performing Family: A Utopian Vision

NURAISHAH SHAFIQ

Hope. It is a fragile thing. Most find it futile in the face of a world so vast in its inequality that even the act of imagining kinder realities is most often mocked as naïve. Systems of oppression are so deeply embedded within the functioning of our society that not only is it difficult to imagine different ways of structuring our world, but a great many individuals feel severely disempowered and without agency to actually pursue efforts in realizing such conceptions. In an era of global capitalism and rampant neoliberal ideology, the struggles one faces in improving the ills of society are no longer so well-defined. Who are we fighting? What are we fighting? As a well-known film theorist Robert Stam indicates, “the enemy now takes a more diffuse, abstract and quasi-ungraspable form” (3). Yes, sometimes the root of abject suffering manifests itself within a person – some politician, a CEO, a drug lord, or any other person who stands on a socio-economic model that pits capital above human life – but often, these people stand in for institutions of power, institutions that prescribe certain means of existing within our world that normalizes inequality as a way of maintaining the status quo. One such institution is the family.

How family has typically been understood is bound by the model of the heteronormative nuclear family. Such a definition may not necessarily suffice for those who do not conform to normative ways of being (e.g. sexuality and gender), and thus isolates these individuals from others. Humans are socially conditioned to expect love and this model subjects them to the violence of prejudice and discrimination. Such a definition deprives people of the means to fulfill the basic need for dependency and intimacy – be it physical, emotional or social – that is inherent to human nature (Davies and Robinson 42). Without the support of family in all its forms, from emotional stability to financial security, one is left vulnerable in a society that privileges the very few at the expense of so many others. Thus, where does hope lie, if one is to challenge such a deeply ingrained and vastly

assimilated idea of family geared towards isolation and violence? The answer is in the radical. It requires a redefinition of family, completely stripped of both the constructs of the nuclear family and heteronormativity, and one that is grounded in the formation of a connection between two or more people that enables them to take on the fundamental roles of a familial unit. These roles include exercising responsibility over the wellbeing of others and providing support which can only take place through the existence of love within a collective.

I am arguing for a model of family that asks for a complete restructuring as opposed to the existing forms. One cannot create a more equitable social space for non-conforming subjectivities if a heteronormative schema serves as one’s basis for reorganization. Instead, one must identify what exactly leads to the construction of familial belonging and actively bring that into being instead of passively accepting the normative notion of family as the default means of organizing social units. In order for me to do this work in redefining family, I turned to the Netflix show Sense8 and its own radical re-conceptualizations of human connection and community. Through this process, I found that choosing to empathize with another’s pain can performatively create a utopian model of family.

The heteronormative nuclear family simply refers to the social unit formed between a mother, a father, and their children. However, the implications of such a structure are far less simplistic. Firstly, heteronormativity dictates binary roles associated with the mother and the father figures within this familial model; roles that must correlate to their biological sex, a phenomenon that becomes part of the formation of gender as a social construct. I find Judith Butler’s notion of performativity crucial here as discussed by Davies and Robinson. According to Butler, repetitive performance of certain practices such as the arbitrary roles of each parental figure, normalizes the construction of gender and the validity of the nuclear family. This performance leads to a widespread perceptual assimilation that the modes of existing within this familial model, as well as the model itself is the default way of functioning successfully within the society; an assimilation that dictates biological, social and legal understandings of the

term family (42). This restriction leads to challenges in inducing a large-scale willingness to accept different models of family which one must combat through the consciously performative capacity of more radical definitions of family. Furthermore, there is a reproductive function attached to the nuclear family manifesting in the belief that the lack of children renders a family incomplete. A biological inability to reproduce children is rectified through methods like adoption and surrogacy enabling couples to still attain the structure of a nuclear family. Due to the prevalence of the nuclear family form and its performative replication on every strata of society, this model of family serves as something towards which one aspires and considers a manifestation of their fulfillment and success in life.

I want to argue against the tendency to measure one’s fulfillment, particularly in the attainment of a familial presence in one’s life, against the standard imposed by the heteronormative nuclear family. This default family structure, into which most people are born, is restrictive in its acceptance of diversity in all its forms including sexual orientation and gender; this structure is inherently conducive towards isolation and the production of violence and pain. Thus, such a model should not be considered the normative means of constructing a family, but merely one of several options.

Sense8, created by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, as well as J. Michael Straczynski is an ambitious cinematic enterprise highlighting the inequality present within the society and imagining solutions to address these including those perpetuated by normative ideas of family. The audience follows eight characters, strangers to one another who are suddenly linked by a superhuman bond, giving rise to the intersection of various human experiences. Through some of these characters’ narratives, the show provides an apt visualization of how the nuclear family is a model rooted in isolation and violence.

Nomi is one such character. She is a transgender woman whose parents, particularly her mother, subjects her to transphobia refusing to accept her for her true identity. This prejudice projected at her is due to Nomi’s inability to conform to heteronormative constructions of gender correlating with biological sex. Transphobia is one of the many institutionalized forms

of violence perpetuated by heteronormativity (Zilonka 395), and it manifests in violent acts that encompass both the physical and emotional. In Nomi’s case, such acts can be seen when as a youth she is forced by a group of adolescent boys under a boiling hot shower in the male locker room to the point of being burnt, as well as when her mother refuses to call her by her chosen name, opting instead to refer to her by her birth name, ‘Michael’ (“Death Doesn’t Let You Say Goodbye” 32:07; “I Am Also A We” 10:25). Furthermore, the depth of this violence is encapsulated in its capacity for self-infliction due to internalized heteronormativity and the pervasive belief that the nuclear family is the only structure through which one finds familial belonging and support, something Nomi notes with, “the real violence, the violence that I realized was unforgivable, is the violence that we do to ourselves when we’re too afraid to be who we really are” (“Death Doesn’t Let You Say Goodbye” 33:33). The violence Nomi experiences at the direct and indirect hands of her parents, the latter through their inability to protect her from other sources of hatred and discrimination, including herself, isolates her from her biological kin. This isolation occurs because the notion of the nuclear family, particularly that predicated on biological kinship, being a default structure generates an illusion of love that leaves one bereft and unsatisfied when one does not conform to heteronormative modes of being. This isolation is not merely limited to those who are perceptibly nonconforming, such as those belonging to the LGBTQ+ community, but everyone who is unable to experience belonging and love from people society has deemed one’s family, simply on the basis of the biologically reproducible model of the nuclear family. Thus, I would like to characterize these individuals as queer, and by doing so detach the term from solely its affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community. I mobilize the term queer as a “relational” term, one that is opposed to the categories of identity sustaining heteronormativity (Davies and Robinson 40). I also draw here on José Esteban Muñoz’s definition of “queer”, a distinguished scholar of queer and performance studies. He understands ‘queerness’ as the quality that enables one to reject the reality one possesses as sufficient evoking the

potential for constructing new modes of existing that lends itself towards utopia – a reorganizing of the existing world to both critique and upend the ruling status quo (1-3, 133). Thus individuals, regardless of their identity expression, can be characterized as queer when they do not passively accept, but instead actively play a role in the reconstruction of family.

Queer subjectivities which do not find love and support within the nuclear family occupy a space to create their own familial unit. These families destabilize heteronormativity as a foundational pillar of society by demonstrating that family structures within such a framework do not need to be reflexively accepted as the norm (Davies and Robinson 42). However, the hegemony of heteronormativity positions these individuals to emulate the nuclear family by directing them to act as consumers of reproductive technologies, including IVF, surrogacy and adoption (43). A queer reconceptualization of family must extend beyond the replication of the nuclear family and instead identify at its most fundamental level, how love and belonging can exist within a collective.

The bond between the principal eight characters in Sense8 – the sensate bond – serves as an interesting case study to deconstruct the formation of familial belonging and understand how to actively create a social unit upon such connections. This bond is psychic in nature, enabling these eight strangers who are geographically separate from one another to occupy each other’s mental landscapes, experiencing and harnessing similar emotions and physical movements, as well as interacting as if they were physically in one another’s presence. The sensate bond is emblematic of the highest form of human connection, unmediated by any physical technology, one that gives rise to a new, more advanced type of being (Mincheva 32-4). As humans that are not yet nor may ever be at that stage, such a bond is something we can only aspire towards and we do so by drawing from this sci-fi rendering of human relationships to enable praxis.

Underlying this unique connection is pain. The bond is initially borne from the physical pain of the sensates’ ‘mother’, Angelica Turing, who undergoes the agony of physical labor to birth this connection. This pain is intensified by the emotional anguish Angelica experiences due to fear that her newborn

sensate ‘children’ will be discovered and harmed for their newly-acquired abilities. Consistently throughout the series, pain is the intermediary around which the bond between the sensates matures from an involuntary linkage to genuine support and love for one another. One such instance can be seen in the episode “I Have No Room in My Heart for Hate”. In one of its scenes, Sun is grieving for both her parents and mourning her role in her brother’s development as corrupt and profit-driven. In response to her pain, every other sensate appears, each offering solidarity and support in their own way, be it an acknowledgement of a shared experience in their own life or reassurance regarding Sun’s emotional turmoil. This demonstration of care and empathy culminates in all eight embracing one another (26:27 – 32:33). The way in which “pain connects us […] binds us better than anything else” (“Amor Vincit Omnia” 18:13) can be extrapolated using Sarah Ahmed’s Affect theory and her notions of “love as empathy” as well as the relationality of pain. Love manifests when one longs to feel the other’s pain for themselves, thereby relinquishing them from the experience of undergoing it alone. However, pain is a solitary thing, and it is almost impossible for multiple people to ever fully understand the experience of one person. And thus, a part of love as empathy is also acknowledgment of one’s struggle. An example is the recognition of pain subjected by the normative definition of family and the absence of belonging felt from this social construct. Such acts are restorative, allowing for pain to be a facilitator of relationships as opposed to a source of isolation (29-30). Pain, regardless of its various manifestations in different life experiences, is universal in its feeling; the acknowledgement and support in engaging with each other’s pain through the process of empathy is foundational to the formation of familial relationships. This process is integral to the existence of love within a collective.

Just as the structure of family cannot be taken for granted, neither can one assume that the process of empathizing across differences be accepted as a passive process that requires no effort. One must choose to actively participate in the formation of the love and support that is the basis of a true family. One must choose to construct and maintain healthy relationships,

unrestricted by the arbitrariness of heteronormative structures. This choice must exist across both biological and fictive kinship. Only deliberate and active decisions directed against the formation or rejection of relationships can give rise to an agency capable of challenging normative modes of being. Agency, particularly amidst pervasive powerlessness, can lead to the conviction needed in sustaining radical models of reorganizing society.

Every family, regardless of its resemblance to the nuclear family or the presence of biological relations, is at its core made. The true definition of family should not be attributed to “something as accidental as blood. But [to] something much stronger […] choice” (“We Will All Be Judged by The Courage of Our Hearts, 14:59). Choice enables one to be selective in harnessing the performativity Butler discusses (Davies and Robinson 42), and conscientiously bring into being the different ways of existing within society. The performativity of family is instrumental in the realization of a utopian world, as it has been for the creation and maintenance of our inherently unjust society.

However, actualizing utopia goes beyond performing everyday practices and roles associated with the familial unit, but also towards the creation of art forms like Sense8, which plays an integral role in the visualization of alternative realities. Film theorist Robert Stam attributes terms such as “radical”, “subversive” and prefigurative” to art that explores the possibility of utopia. Sense8 is an example of such art, as well as what José Esteban Muñoz terms a “queer aesthetic” (1). There is a liminality inherent in descriptors such as “queer” and “radical”, a liminality reminiscent of the anthropological Turnerian usage of the word. The world evoked by these revolutionary art forms lie somewhere between physical manifestation and utter illusion, potential and impossibility, justifiable hope and futile wistfulness (Mincheva 38, Muñoz 1, Stam 6-8). Its evocative function, this ability to visualize and interrogate different worlds is essential to performativity. Art is necessary in the expansion of the imagination without which one would be at a loss regarding the options available from which to choose to performatively bring into existence. For many, including myself, the capacity to imagine alternative ways of organizing and creating families would be non-existent or limited if it were not for Sense8.

Hope. It is a fragile thing. Many find it futile, but this need not be the case any longer. The redefinition of family demonstrates that agency is very much still within our possession if we are to play a conscious and active role in choosing the various modes of existence, we perform into being, such as the people we consider family and what exactly familial belonging constitutes. In the face of vast structures of inequality, we must not discount hope, for we must turn to it to illuminate alternative versions of our world that are kinder to the diversity of the human experience.

WORKS CITED

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Mincheva, Dilyana. “Sense 8 and the Praxis of Utopia.” Cinephile, vol. 12, no. 1, 2018.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New

York University Press, 2009. Sense8. Directed by Lana Wachowski et al., Netflix, 2015. Stam, Robert. Keywords in Subversive Film-Media Aesthetics. Malden, MA, 2015.

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Sense8 Teach Us About Love, Community and Responsibility in Days of

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