What claims the place of the nuclear family in the face of hybrid kinships and social freezing? What could new elective kinships be in times of chatbots and pseudonymisation? Is this the time for surrogate mother tongues and extra-human ­rhetorics of surrogation?   Sophie Lewis claims a gestational ­communism and hunts our grannies. Barbara Vinken ­reflects on spiritual motherhood, Luciana Parisi on ­human automata and gendered proxies. For ­Zuzana Cela, language is a foreign body that can be ­invaginated. Werner Hamacher strolls...

When non-disabled artists such as Jérôme Bel or Christoph Schlingensief in their productions work with actors who, in hegemonic discourse, are referred to as disabled, they almost invariably face criticism over the exploitation and voyeuristic exhibition of these people. Bel’s Disabled Theater anticipated such reservations and took a good deal of wind out of its critics’ sails by having the performers themselves raise these issues on stage and report on their families’ reactions to the piece. Nevertheless, the question whether...