Moving Kinship

In this compelling text, choreographer and psychotherapist Beatrice Allegranti invites the reader into the transdisciplinary Moving Kinship project. Moving Kinship spans a decade of practice-led research with people experiencing early onset dementia; Black feminist activists; psychotherapists; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer artists and activists; capoeiristas; and an international team of professional dancers and composers, musicians and scientists.

Allegranti’s practice is a more-than-collaboration: it involves accounting for deeply embodied and embedded oppression and privilege in the micro-relating of everyday life. She discusses this reckoning as a kin-aesthetic practice, and the message is foundationally feminist. The book opens possibilities for different registers of feminist justice and puts feminist new materialism, posthumanism and intersectional body politics to work in ways that affirm the paradox that every living thing moves everywhere, all the time, yet every movement is never neutral. As a white Italian-Irish feminist with a transgenerational legacy of the corrosive impact of fascism, she also weaves her own kinship story into dominating systems of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, intersecting in ways that are alive and well today.

Moving Kinship offers a rich resource for feminist activists and scholars, trauma-informed therapists, somatic, movement and dance practitioners, artists and those interested in ethical and politically just ways to materially engage with grief, loss, dispossession and trauma.