Social Distancing

Great discussion yesterday. Thanks for your contributions.

One of the things that we probed (and which was raised by Dagmar) was that the lockdown does not so much force us to live in solitude, but it forces us to retreat into into nuclear families.

The 'lockdown' is - of course - a lockdown of the public sphere. But, perhaps more troubling, the Dutch government announced, time and again, that the only form of intimacy that the state allows for (and that break the 1,5 m rule) is the onebetween members of a household.  Only members of a household (gezin) can be together in public, can share cars, hold hands, etc. .)

The funny thing, of course, is that 'household' is, on the one hand, a purely secular, economical term. People who live together in one oikos are a household. One can be a 'household' for tax purposes.

But on the other hand, the exemplary case of a 'household' - een gezin-  is still the nuclear family.

This led to a few moments of comedy. In Spain, for example young couples who do not live together have to smuggle into each others houses to remain unnoticed by the police. In the Netherlands (I think it was in Groningen) a group of students who share a flat ran into trouble with the police because they claimed that they were, indeed, forming a household.

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So if The Queer Art of Failure invites us to think about the question how to think 'community' and 'kinship' in terms other than that of the family, or think of intimacy in other terms than those of romance, the Lockdown turns this question into an urgent one. 

This question is, perhaps, particularly urgent for students. Being a student means (in the Netherlands at least) being between families. 'Op kamers gaan' involves leaving your family and inserting yourself into all sorts of intimate  kinship structures based on friendships: from fraternities, student houses to networks of friends, activists, etc. 

The old structuralist (Levi-Straussian / Lacanian) picture of kinship was one of families, in which you were first born into a family. And then, through marriage, you became part of a different family. 

The current situation, however (at least for Dutch students) is that there is a period between different forms of family lives. This is the period in which different 'zones' or 'networks' of intimacy are created. 

 I hope that the Lockdown will not put this period in suspense.