Make Kin, Not Babies: Literary Futures for the Chthulucene

Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin, not babies” advocates the radical transcendence of species boundaries in the service of an ethic of relational care. In her latest publication, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), the ecofeminist author envisions a futuristic world on the cusp of ecological balance by probing modes of multispecies entanglement. The Chthulucene, Haraway’s term for an emergent epoch defined not by human exceptionalism but by situated, tentacular, and ongoing interrelations, rests firmly on anti-patriarchal, anti-sexist, and anti-racist intellectual frameworks. Her writing breaks out of traditional epistemologies and explores the possibility of relationships with “diverse earthwide tentacular powers and forces … including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as humus” (Haraway 101). This vision challenges dominant Anthropocene narratives that cast humanity as an isolated and privileged agent and simultaneously obscure the interdependence of all earth-bound beings.

A concrete example of Haraway’s ethic appears in the final chapter, “The Camille Stories.” Here, the author sketches out a speculative world in which prospective children are biologically merged with non-human companion species before birth. In order to relieve the strain of human overpopulation on the environment and simultaneously deepen affective bonds across different forms of life, this genetic redesign results in a demographically stable, multispecies community over five successive generations.

This talk positions Haraway’s text within contemporary ecofeminist debates and demonstrates how literary imagination functions as a critical intervention against the deterministic pessimism of future-oriented Anthropocene discourses. Rather than echoing growth-centric economic paradigms or feeding into climate change denialism, narratives like “The Camille Stories” generate alternative epistemologies that reveal entrenched power relations and interrogate the problematic values that underpin the status quo. As tools in societal discourse, they thereby subtly relocate the site of theory and knowledge production to the realm of speculative fabulation and imaginative world-making, where they cultivate forms of collective resilience.