I would like to thank Juliet Hooker for her thoughtful and attentive review of my book, and to use this space to consider some of the questions it raises about boundness relative to kinship language and identification.

Calls to boundness challenge atomized and hierarchical categories of political life, seeing conditions of violence and possibilities of freedom as intimately co-constituted across lines of power and difference. Boundness demands a reckoning with disavowed histories of violence and resistance, and it claims inexorable and embodied connections, such as between people tied by great sacrifice to freedom struggles (for Rivera), by “flesh and bone” (for Baldwin, in his theorization of race-making in the context of slavery and Jim Crow), or by conditions of “freedom” built through conditions of unfreedom. Appeals to boundness are especially unpredictable and experimental precisely because they are aimed at cutting through spaces and temporalities whereby/wherethrough claims to racial and gendered hierarchies are maintained and rehearsed. Although boundness and kinship language swirl together in the book, boundness is articulated in more ways than through kinship language (my chapters are sites of these different valences), and, in turn, only very rarely in broader political discourse do kinship appeals invoke boundness. Across a huge range of sites and scales, kinship appeals work at different depths and directions of inflection, naturalizing or redrawing existing relationships of power.

One distinct characteristic of kinship or other intimate language as used in invocations of boundness is that it is not being used tactically. Rivera, Baldwin, or SONG, for example, do not use intimate language instrumentally to call listeners into something that is transactional or coalitional; they are reminding them that they are bound together, calling them into intimate forms of identification. Their appeals are prefigurative in that the form of the calls enacts the forms of identification being summoned. When Sylvia Rivera addressed her listeners at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade and in 2001 at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, for example, she was not calling for a thin solidarity. Instead, in her forms of address, she was enacting the very kinds of intimate relationships she wanted her audience to share with her: as people bound as kin to their gay siblings in jail, and later as her “children” bound to her through her and other street queens’ immense sacrifices to radical liberation politics. For Rivera, that her listeners may (and did) neglect and fail in their obligations does not nullify these bindings. At the heart of the book is not only a story about these calls but about the identifications and the webs of relationship they summon, anchored in mutuality and shared freedom. In these politics, distinctions between public and intimate fall away, and there is no entering these politics without being transformed.

The field of identification is an open and unstable terrain. Ella Baker’s potent question, “who are your people?,” for example, does not have an empirically obvious answer but is an exquisitely generative tool in her organizing. With this question, Baker works in a field that is at once shaped and constrained by the freight of history—by the lineages of identifications and disidentifications, as Hooker put it (and which I love)—and politically open and uncertain. Nothing is given in advance, and there is so much at stake.