Danilyn Rutherford

Who gets to be the expert when it comes to care? Mother knows best, goes one version of the saying. Should it really be up to the doctors to decide what’s wrong and what to do? But what happens when mother doesn’t know best? When that warm and caring role starts feeling like an awkward gorilla costume, soft on the outside, hot and itchy on the inside, a get-up that makes it hard to move, see, and breathe?

What is communicated in communication? Given our assumptions about language and personhood, we Americans tend to think we know. Yet for those of us who live in the company of people like my daughter, there isn’t a clear answer to this question. We dream of depths of meaning. But our loved ones have taught us that communication is just as much a matter of surfaces, of the sensations that swirl around a touch, a sound, or a sight.

Proximity can be overwhelming. Proximity can be particularly overwhelming in these modern times. When we become close to another person, we expect them to affirm our identity: to help us see ourselves for who we really are. This is as much the case for our disabled children as for lovers. But what happens when we don’t get the recognition we’ve been taught we need?

It is time for anthropology to reclaim the empirical. But this reclaiming must be accompanied by a rethinking of what empiricism means. What I affirm in this article is a kind of empiricism that builds on the singular power of anthropological ways of knowing the world. A kinky empiricism: kinky, like a slinky, twisting back on itself, but also kinky, like S and M and other queer elaborations of established scenarios, relationships, and things.