Kinship Ceremonies
Celebrating the ways we create kinship on our own terms.
Kinship Ceremonies is a reimagining of our organizational anchor project ‘Mamas Day’ into a four-segment caregiver-celebration that highlights the gender expansiveness of parenting, guardianship, and care.
By centering this digital campaign around Nonbinary Parents Day, Mamas Day, LGBTQ Families Day, and Fathers Day, Kinship Ceremonies seeks to dissolve ideas around the gender binary and the carceral definition of ‘family’ through the sharing of art and poetry.
Download Art
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Artist Spotlight
EBIN LEE
Ebin Lee is a Chicago-based artist whose work is a scrapbook and visual journal of black, queer and trans existence. They studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR, where they developed a multidisciplinary approach to making with an illustration focus. Ebin uses art and their sketchbook to communicate what can’t be communicated with words.
Poetry
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Kinship is beautiful. Kinship is messy. Kinship is what you make of it.
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Coming Soon: Father's Day
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About
Kinship Ceremonies was dreamed up as an opportunity to curate and encourage conversations on family and kinship as expansive. Each ceremony is grounded on a certain caregiver celebration.
- Nonbinary Parents Day (observed on the third Sunday in April) was created by Johnny Blazes in the wake of an ongoing cultural absence of a celebration of parents beyond the binary. Nonbinary Parents Day shows us that care beyond borders is possible.
- Since 2011, our legacy project Mamas Day (observed on the second Sunday in May) has been ongoing as an intervention and weaponized resistance to the limits of commercialization and white cis-heterosexist capitalism. In the United States, Mother’s Day reinforces limited and traditional ideals of motherhood and care – which excludes many mamas, mothers, and caregivers across race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, ability, and class.
- LGBTQ Families Day (observed on the first weekday of June) was founded in 2006 by Mombian, a site for lesbian moms and LGBTQ parents. LGBTQ Families Day was developed as a radical offering to celebrate expansiveness in kinship, chosen and committed love, and parenting across gender and sexuality. This ceremony is an opportunity to honor familial dynamics of care that both embody possibilities beyond the binary and affirm cultural shifts towards more variegated representation of queer pasts and futures.
- Fathers Day (observed on the third Sunday in June) has never been revered at our organization due to the limitations and violences of white supremacist patriarchal cultures of domination. Through our work in spotlighting the exclusionary systemic definition of ‘family’, Fathers Day in the United States has been positioned as both a parenthetical capitalistic invention and a privileged marker of white supremacist criteria of nuclear family structure. We choose to celebrate and honor a version of Fathers Day that expands our continued legacy project of Mamas Day to include more language and embodiments that include kinship, broods, care, and family beyond the limits of antiblack supremacy.
This campaign is also an extension of our living anthology, New Visions: Expanding Care, Questioning Relations. Forward Together culture workers created 9 written, audio, and visual pieces meant to explore the themes of family definition and abolition. We invite you to view Kinship Ceremonies as a continuation of our intervention around care, belonging, and connection.
