Six - Rethinking Kinship Systems

Summary

This chapter explores some of the ways transhumanists envision the posthuman family. From attempts to create digital offspring through the use of software fertility doctors, to establishing intimate relationships with robotic kin, to advocating for forms of biological reproduction that involve multiple genitors and occur in a laboratory rather than a womb, transhumanists propose that the posthuman family will look considerably different than it does today. The point of this chapter is not to determine whether or not these possibilities will be actualized in the future, but rather, to explore and explain why this way of construing kinship makes sense to transhumanists. In so doing, the chapter will further our understanding of transhumanism and provide yet another example of the diverse ways our species has attempted to imagine and configure something we call family.