Oddkin

Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin, rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin…troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible….What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines connect and disconnect, and so what?

Haraway is reclaiming kin to mean not merely blood relatives (“godkin”) but also those whose company1 we choose to be in (“oddkin”). “Odd” works here to mean unexpected or unusual but also suggests the odd ones out. “Oddkin” brings the odd ones together into kinship.

Oddkin stakes the claim that the shape of kinship isn’t a birthright but a choice, that the people we choose to gather with are connected to us in ways at least equivalent to those we were born alongside. However odd that gathering may be—and Haraway posits that oddkin includes not only people but every living thing around us, the trees and birds and rivers and bugs—it is one in which we are responsible to each other.