On Ex-Lovers
And yet others who like this last scene understand that queer kinship has always been wrought from ties between ex-lovers, and that though Strella and Yiorgos have lost each other as lovers, they have remained family, not so much as father and son but as ex-lovers. Indeed, psychoanalytically, one might say that the parent is the very first ex-lover, and that we have to include among "ex-lovers" those with whom we never had sex, but with whom we were bound together from the start by inchoate passions. If family members are the first love objects we are compelled to give up, then families of origin are by definition ex-lovers.
Judith Butler in Dispossession: The Performative In The Political, also written with Athena Athanasiou








