ABSTRACT:

What would happen if we accepted technological connection as a form of reckoning kinship? In exploring this position, I draw on accounts of disability and illness. First, I focus on an account of fecal microbial transplant use and the intimate connections developed and maintained between the recipient and donor the technology creates. This is followed with the case of a woman who relies upon Facilitated Communication to communicate with her social others, which depends on her use of other persons to interact with a keyboard. In both cases, material connections with and through technology disrupt the putative nature of kinship as based in “custom” and “blood.” Taking technological mediation in the production of kinship networks seriously destabilizes humanist conceptions of the contours and capacities of bodies, eroding the distinction between self and world. In apprizing the role of technology in making kinship networks, attention to disability and illness experiences of the world point to ways out of dominant conceptions of the human and the need to ethnographically attend to non-normative bodily engagements with material worlds as the basis for emergent forms of personhood and subjectivity.