Queer kinship: a perversion

Queer kinship: a perversionRM

#essay, #non-nuclearfamily, #kinship

My friends Kaja and Nikita and I met in 2016. We were guest students in the art university of Hamburg. They, both Danish and 22, had not known one another before but an instant spark erupted between them, one that made their encounter feel as if they were in some way meant to be. As months passed by I grew closer to them. We spent a few afternoons together, the three of us gathered by the hearth of one or the other’s apartment, playing with clay or sharing hot tomato soup. Thinking of them as separate people grew unthinkable. I could not mention one of their names separately from the other’s. Kaja and Nikita. Nikita and Kaja. It did not take them long to realize that they shared something that could barely be put into words. A love, respect and admiration for one another beyond what vocabulary could describe. A kinship, perhaps?

After I left Hamburg our friendship became distant but remained as honest and genuine as ever. It became clear to them that they would share a life, they wanted to weave each other’s space, time, minds and bodies. They moved in together to an empty apartment which they furnished with flea market and self-made furniture and decorations. As often happens with long-withstanding partners, the space reflects their joint personalities but the fragments of their individuality remain represented in their private bedrooms. Kaja’s, the agreeable, smiley and childlike, grew into an indoor jungle with segments of pink and babydoll limbs hanging from the ceiling (she finds their chubbiness and shortness amusing to draw). Nikita’s, stoic, mature and practical, has a wall-wide bookcase, a drawing desk and a mattress laid out on the floor.

After five years of having settled in Hamburg they became the nucleus of a tight knit group of artists and illustrators who spiraled in their direction looking for a place for safety and familiarity. They both fell well into the role of care-takers and their kitchen grew into a place for kinship, reflection and play. This group is now more like a chosen extended family, bound together not by blood, but by the willingness to find intimacy outside the constrictions of the nuclear family, an intention to form a fenceless home with plenty of porch life, without a rectory that determines the straight path to follow.

In many ways Kaja and Nikita have unintentionally perverted my views on family, romantic partnerships, heterosexuality, intimacy, and gender roles. Without willing to be disobedient, their nature originated a challenge to what seems immutable by their gender. They refuse to make their bodies exclusive to receive affect and validation from their heterosexual partners, releasing both parties from the burdens of the absolute responsibility and faithfulness usually expected from heteronormative relationships. Far apart from the hegemonic nuclear family, they have cemented a queer form of family which embraces non-blood-related members and non-sexual partnerships. Kaja is together with her 3-year boyfriend (whose name is also Nikita. Coincidence?), and Nikita as well as their kin keep their hearts open to other forms of relationships, but certain that in that little apartment in Wilhelmsburg they will always find home.