In this powerful and compelling book, Lisa Beard issues an important corrective to political scientists who focus only on political behavior and take identification and group membership or interests as preexisting, stable variables. Instead, If We Were Kin calls us to attend to the appeals through which political identifications are built, remade, and constantly contested. The book’s central question is “how people politically come to understand who they are, what their interests are, and how they are connected to others” (p. 1). Beard answers that one important means through which they do so is by issuing or responding to identificatory appeals “that tell us who we are politically and, in doing so, call us into ways of being in the world” (p. 8). They define political appeals as “speech acts that work through the art and language of persuasion. They are discursive, emotional, and relational … Identificatory appeals are acts meant to call people into forms of identification” (pp. 7–8).

In particular, the book focuses on intimate appeals to political identification structured in terms of the concept of “boundness,” which reconfigures the “we” of identification by calling others into community and belonging. Appeals to boundness “are not calls for a kind of coalition that would maintain notions of discrete groups but instead are appeals to deeper forms of identification, meant to produce transformed subjects who have transformed relationships… Partly, boundness is enunciated through an account of how conditions of violence are co-constituted across racial (and gendered, classed, and colonial) lines” (p. 156). Political appeals made in terms of boundness, they argue, “constitute a distinct lineage within the wider field of identificatory appeals in U.S. political culture” (p. 2). Beard calls us to pay attention to the practices through which contending political actors advance “alternative interpretations about what it means to identify in certain ways” and how people respond to such calls, and to understand these as “a primary site of politics” (p. 8). They argue that “political identity is made up of an assemblage of identifications and … Disidentifications … [It is] something people ‘do’ rather than something people ‘are’” (p. 7). If We Were Kin is not primarily about how people experience their identities, but rather about the public practices of identification through which such attachments are built, changed, or discarded over time in historically contingent ways.

Beard analyzes some of the intimate identificatory appeals crafted by Black, Latinx, and queer and trans activists and thinkers involved in late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century political struggles in the United States. The book is divided into four chapters and an interlude, each devoted to a different example of a political appeal structured in terms of different versions of “boundness.” Chapter 1, on the activism and political thought of trans liberation pioneer Sylvia Rivera, focuses on the identificatory appeal she issued in a 1973 speech as the gay liberation movement was increasingly turning toward White middle-class assimilatory politics and an incremental civil rights approach. At a rally commemorating the Stonewall rebellion, from which trans people had been excluded, Rivera’s “countercall” summoned the mostly White middle-class audience into broader forms of identification, to see themselves as connected with incarcerated gender nonconforming people who were most vulnerable to state and homophobic violence and who had already made enormous sacrifices (material and otherwise) for the freedom of the audience in the park, a group who were now refusing to honor those obligations. Rivera called “upon the crowd as people who are socially and politically indebted to her and who are related to her as political kin” (p. 29). Beard shows that “the political fight in Washington Square Park that day was a fight over what gay forms of identification would mean politically—that is, what are the political imperatives and interests of ‘gay politics.’” In contrast to dominant LGB (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual) groups, Rivera called for a version of gay identity “that would prioritize prison abolition, antiracism, class justice, and trans liberation” (p. 27). Chapter 2 focuses on the concept of boundness in James Baldwin’s work, which Beard argues was central to his identificatory appeals in the 1960s. Baldwin grounded his account of how Black and White Americans are morally bound to each other in a “peculiar kinship narrative that foregrounds racialized /sexual violence” (p. 47). While recognizing that this is a fraught and complex terrain, Beard finds in Baldwin’s attention to racialized embodiment, and simultaneous refusal of essentialist notions of race, important resources for challenging contemporary color-blind discourses. Baldwin “highlights the blood level kinship and psychic shared life of Blackness and whiteness not as an invitation for a postracial intimacy but as a political strategy … to hold white people accountable for their identities and to provoke shifts in identification” (p. 68). Chapter 3 analyzes three different historical moments (two in the 1960s and one in 2015) when racial justice activists issued appeals to state officials to take responsibility for ending racist violence, focusing in particular on Lorraine Hansberry’s intervention during the meeting Baldwin arranged between Black activists and intellectuals and Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963. Chapter 4 analyzes three decades of activism by SONG, a self-described LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer) “kinship organization,” that rejects single-issue organizing on the basis of ideas of boundness. There is also an interlude on Pat Buchanan’s Far Right identificatory appeals in the 1990s, built on nostalgic notions of white nationalist kinship and demonological constructions of various “others.”

If We Were Kin makes a number of important contributions. First, Beard’s focus on the process through which people are brought into identification asks political scientists to rethink how identities are formed and enacted politically. In particular, the book provides a powerful rebuttal to critiques of “identity politics” by showing that all politics are identitarian—if by that we mean that they involve “struggles over identification, appeals to identification, or political mobilization through and generative of identification” (p. 103). Second, the book traces an important and understudied (in political science at least) lineage of expansive LGBTQ activism from STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, the organization co-founded by Rivera) to SONG that have understood anti-carceral, sex worker, and houselessness struggles and immigrant and economic justice as central to LGBTQ politics, in contrast to dominant organizations. Third, and relatedly, by excavating the important political ideas of activists and organizations who left behind only fragmentary archives, such as Rivera and STAR, it adds to other scholarship that seeks to reframe who counts as a thinker worthy of study by political theorists and the kinds of texts political theorists should attend to. Many of the “texts” Beard reads, for example, are videos of speeches or encounters, as in Buchanan and Rivera’s speeches, and the interaction between Movement for Black Lives activists and Hilary Clinton. Fourth, among the many important critical insights in the book is the careful tracing of the lineages of identification and disidentification that have led us to the present moment. If political appeals are historically sedimented, Beard shows that Trump was preceded by Buchanan’s construction of and yearning for a lost racialized and gendered political order threatened by feminists, LGBTQ people, and people of color, and that current mass deportation efforts framed as targeting “criminal immigrants” were preceded by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policies under Obama targeting “felons, not families” for deportation (p. 153).

While all the examples of identificatory appeals analyzed in If We Were Kin are deeply interesting, it was not exactly clear what the rationale was for case selection. Beard explains that their “sites of study are not chosen because they have historically won in terms of becoming dominant interpretations but because the specifics of the cases illuminate actors’ attempts to reconstitute forms of identification and reconstitute structures of care and responsibility within and across political communities” (p. 12). One question raised by the focus on boundness in particular is whether political appeals framed in terms of kinship are less apt for certain kinds of identifications. It would have been illuminating to see whether unions, for example, also traffic in intimate appeals that make claims to boundness. Another related question is the complex questions raised by drawing on—even reformulated—notions of kinship in calls for identification. At various points, Beard acknowledges that invocations of family are complex but argues that their cases reveal that “familial language is quite potent for organizing people,” and that activists, especially LGBTQ people confronting homophobia and transphobia from the Right in the name of “family values,” refuse to cede this terrain of struggle (p. 131). This is a compelling point, but it raises other questions about identificatory appeals in terms of kinship. Are they more prevalent or more effective than those that do not rely on such metaphors? What is the relationship between non-kinship and kin-based appeals and identifications? What kind of relations can we establish with people who are not our people? I take Beard’s answer to be that these two categories are always in flux as a result of the kinds of identificatory appeals that reshape who we think we are and who we are responsible for.

If We Were Kin is a deeply interesting and well-crafted book that should be of interest, not only to political theorists but to social scientists more broadly. It challenges political scientists to think differently about “the we of politics” (p. 1), and it offers a deeply hopeful account of how people can be called to more expansive visions of political community.