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Some of the subjects of Puppies and Babies may not identify as queer, but it doesn__ matter: the installation queers them. By which I mean to say that it partakes in a long history of queers constructing their own families__e they composed of peers or mentors or lovers or ex-lovers or children or non-human animals__nd that it presents queer family making as an umbrella category under which baby making might be a subset, rather than the other way around. It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.
Maggie Nelson The Argonauts
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Some of the subjects of Puppies and Babies may not identify as queer, but it doesn__ matter: the installation queers them. By which I mean to say that it partakes in a long history of queers constructing their own families__e they composed of peers or mentors or lovers or ex-lovers or children or non-human animals__nd that it presents queer family making as an umbrella category under which baby making might be a subset, rather than the other way around. It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.
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Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts

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Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.