Page 6 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Lise Weil

EDITORIAL

Who and whatever we are, we need to make-with—become-with, compose-

with—the earthbound... My purpose is to make kin mean something other/more

than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy.

Donna Haraway

And I've long thought there is no environment. There is only community

comprised of organisms who exist within bounds without borders. Organisms

whose birth, survival, and death ensures communal thriving.

Megan Hollingsworth, ex•tinc•tion wit•ness July 2016

This issue of Dark Matter was inspired by Donna Haraway’s essay

“Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”i in

which she argues that a revisioning of “kin” and “kinship” to include non-blood

relations and nonhumans is imperative for us now as a species (“Make Kin, Not

Babies!” is her proposed slogan). The call we sent out was for “writing and

artwork that offer ways to embody and/or enact an expanded vision of

kin/kinship.” Interestingly, most of the material we received centered on human-

nonhuman relationships and most especially on human-animal kinship. At some

point in production, between the fact that much of the writing we had expected to

publish here was still in progress and that this issue had already burst its seams,

it became clear that this was Part I of a two-part series. Part II of “Making Kin” will

appear in spring of 2017 with more on making kin across the human-nonhuman

divide, but also—we promise!—at least some writing on human-human

relationships.