“Had we had another way of guaranteeing each other’s rights,” he said, “we would not have resorted to such a patriarchal and limited tool.”
The writer Michela Murgia married Lorenzo Terenzi in a civil marriage and announced this with a video on her Instagram profile. In the caption accompanying the video, he explained the reasons for this choice, which somehow did not align with Murgia’s beliefs and with his idea of family:
We did so reluctantly: if we had another way of guaranteeing each other’s rights, we would never have resorted to such a paternalistic and limited instrument, which compels us to reduce an experience so much richer and more powerful to the representation of the couple, in which the number 2 is the opposite of what we are. So there are no wishes, because the rituals we used to wish for do not yet exist. But they will be there, and we want to help revive them. In a few days in the garden of the still-moving house, we will realize our idea of celebrating the queer family.
The “queer family” is the type of elective family Murgia has built over the years and has spoken publicly about recently, after he announced his serious illness.
gay It is an English word with its original meaning “queer” which has long been used as a pejorative term to refer to homosexuals; Today, however, it is claimed by the LGBTQ+ community (Q word in short gay) to include all non-conforming sexual identities, but also to describe philosophies regarding queer perspectives and the cultures they develop. Therefore, it also refers to a way of conceiving life and relationships, and in this sense, this term is used by Murgia: a queer family is a group of people who are not necessarily related by kinship ties and in which there is no monogamy. Spouses, nor other types of traditional relationships. In Murgia’s words, it is “an atypical family core, in which relationships are more important than roles. Words like Sahabi, my son, my brother are not enough to explain it ». For this reason, what a queer family looks like cannot be unequivocally defined: a person can decide to create one with a group of loved ones who are willing to live together without specific core bonds.
The queer family represents a personal life choice, and yet, for the writer, a feminist activist for years, it is also a political act. “If I could leave a symbolic legacy,” he wrote, “I would like it to be this: another model of relationship, another model of those who have had to fight in life always feeling something less.”
Murgia also specified that the ceremony was complete in Mortis jointThat is, without the need for leaflets, because one of the spouses is about to die. The writer has advanced stage cancer: “Every day there are different physical complications, I go in and out of the hospital and now we don’t take anything for granted anymore.” The choice of civil marriage is linked to Murgia’s circumstances as it would allow her to help her chosen family in the last moments of her life.
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