"Bodies That Gather: Practicing Attachment in Queer Kinship Narrative"

Contemporary gender anxieties are intimately bound up with fears around the erosion of traditional kinship. These fears are not unfounded. As Elizabeth Freeman and I have argued, kinship is becoming increasingly queer. More and more people are departing from cisheteronormative plots for marriage, reproduction, and long-term commitment, even those who do not identify as LGBTQ+. Of course, the queering of kinship has elicited a fierce backlash, led by white supremacists, misogynists, and Christian nationalists, who aim to revive heteropatriarchy at any and all costs. Yet it has also given rise to an explosion of new kinship narratives, which chart queerer trajectories for intimacy and belonging. In this talk, I show how queer kinship narrative gives shape to the practices of attachment that sustain queer bonds over time. In particular, these narratives confront the gaps between diffuse political ideals, like “queer community,” and the concrete forms through which we live queerness as a social relation. In doing so, queer kinship narratives point to horizons for political solidarity defined less by our sexual or gender identities and more by how we practice queer kinship with others in the world. Often misread as apolitical, queer kinship narratives teach us how to nurture desires for collective interdependency in the face of fear, distrust, disappointment, and exhaustion. By focusing on the narrative dimensions of queer kinship, I strive to rebalance the disciplinary scales of gender and sexuality studies, which have increasingly tilted away from the humanities toward the social sciences. I contend that the field still has much to learn from queer literary studies and especially a queer theory attuned to the narrative dimensions of intimacy, kinship, and solidarity.

Teagan Bradway (she/they) is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland and a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University for 2025-26. In 2024, Bradway was a Hunt-Simes Visiting Junior Chair of Sexuality Studies with the Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney. Bradway is the author ofQueer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading (2017). Bradway is co-editor (with Elizabeth Freeman) ofQueer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (2022) and (with E.L. McCallum) ofAfter Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century (2019), which won a CHOICE award. Bradway guest edited“Unaccountably Queer” (2024), a special issue of differences, and“Lively Words: The Politics and Poetics of Experimental Writing” (2019), a special issue of College Literature. Bradway’s articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming inPMLA, GLQ, MLQ, Textual Practice, ASAP/J, Stanford Arcade, Studies in the Fantastic, Mosaic, Biography, andThe Nation as well as various collections on contemporary literature and queer theory, including Contemporary Queer Modernisms and The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature. Currently, Bradway is completing a book on queer forms of relationality and co-writing “Endless Love” with the late Elizabeth Freeman.