Call for Papers
Queer Kinship across Time and Space
Christ Church, University of Oxford, 9-10 April 2025
This is the second of a series of international conferences on the theme of queer kinship, organised by the Queer Kinship Network (Siena-Oxford-Toronto). The overall project seeks to explore queer kinship: affective bonds, relationships and family forms that diverge from and innovate beyond the model of the heteronormative family. With a primary focus on the Italian and English-speaking worlds, it investigates culturally marginalised histories and new transformative queer kinship dynamics, across different cultural contexts and time periods. By fostering critical debate and intercultural exchange, the project develops a deeper awareness of diverse configurations of queer bonds and families within a multicultural and inclusive framework. As well as rendering forms of queer kinship more visible, the project seeks to inform current debates on inclusivity, wellbeing and representation.
The queer family and queer affective bonds are certainly not new phenomena, and many modalities of queer kinship, beyond legal family structures, or the pervasive norm of the ‘couple’, have existed for a considerable time: these include, but are not limited to, so-called romantic friendships, Boston marriages, polyamorous communities, queer kinship groups, and unconventional adoptions such as fillus de anima. Many forms of queer kinship have been marginalised in the socio-cultural contexts we study and beyond, or ‘read out’ of cultural texts, and continue to be stigmatised in some way. Texts which express queer bonds have been censored, or remained unpublished, and individuals and groups are discriminated against. This is particularly the case in Italy, where historic and current governments and institutions have propagated racist, heteronormative, homo- and transphobic discourses and legislation. It is also the case in the Anglophone world, which is marred by imperial homophobic and transphobic laws and where contemporary violent discourses against 2SLGBTQIA+ people and women are setting the clock of social progress back. In response to this violence and hoping to support the building of intellectual tools against it, the project seeks to render cultural expressions of queer kinship more visible, to analyse their variegated dynamics. The transcultural and transnational circulation of discourses on queer families and kinship has yet to be fully assessed and investigated. A deeper understanding of these cultural discourses is crucial to improving our awareness of the experiences, innovative practices and wellbeing of those who choose to diverge from the script of the heteronormative family.
This conference at Christ Church, Oxford will explore cultural representation of queer kinship across time and space. One starting point might be the late nineteenth century, a period marked by significant shifts in terms of how sexuality was understood and represented. Some questions we seek to explore are: how have understandings of sexuality and family structures from this period shaped later forms of queer affect? What forms of queer affect preceded this period, and how do they resonate across the years, creating a queer ‘touch across time’ (Dinshaw)? How are we bound by this past, what do we inherit from it, and how do we either harness or escape its legacies (Love)? We are particularly keen to receive contributions for papers that trace modalities and articulations of queer affect across cultures, and temporal periods, identifying resonances, or what Lanser calls ‘confluence’, and noting variations between forms of queer kinship in different periods. As well as rendering forms of queer kinship more visible, and bringing them into dialogue, this diachronic and cross-cultural focus will facilitate critical reflection on what we can learn from more and less recent practices and discourses that can inform current debates.
Themes for discussion include (but are not limited to):
- Resonances and divergences between forms of queer kinship in different periods and cultural contexts;
- Queer kinship beyond the couple norm;
- Childless adults, parentless children and their affective ties;
- Queer communities;
- Polyamory;
- Intersections of race, class, ability, gender, and sexuality and their impact on queer families and communities;
- Multigenerational kinship;
- Queer mobility and queer diasporas
- The relationship between different textual genres, e.g. novels, memoirs, self-help books, films, historical documents;
- Intercultural and interlinguistic translations and transpositions of queer kinship;
- Methodologies and vocabularies for exploring queer kinship and lineages across time and cultural contexts.
Please submit a 250-word abstract plus a brief bio (max 100 words), in English or Italian, by 20th January 2025, via this form.
Confirmed plenary speakers:
Stefano Evangelista
Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Trinity Hall, University of Oxford, his work explores the links between English literature and other languages, classical antiquity, visual culture and the history of sexuality. He is author of British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (2009), Citizens of Nowhere: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle (2021) and editor of numerous collections on topics including the reception of Oscar Wilde (2010), the Victorian poet A.C. Swinburne (2013), and translation in Decadent literature (2020).
Vetri Nathan
Associate Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA, Vetri Nathan specialises in the exploration of national, racial and diasporic identities, both in Italy and the wider Mediterranean region. He is author of Marvelous Bodies: Italy’s New Migrant Cinema (2017), and of numerous articles on migration, diversity and identity. He is the founder and director of The Cybercene Lab, a space to study multispecies wellbeing, healing and habitability, and the connections between cultural discourse, manufactured conflicts, climate change and habitat/biodiversity loss.
Selby Wynn Schwartz
She is the author of academic articles and several acclaimed books that explore questions of gender, embodiment and queerness in Italian, French and British cultures. Her book The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives was a finalist for a 2020 Lambda Literary Award. Her next book, After Sappho, was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. In 2024, Schwartz was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature at the American Academy in Rome.
For any further information, please contact Charlotte Ross: charlotte.ross@chch.ox.ac.uk
Speakers will receive a notification of confirmation by 10 February 2025.
This is an in-person event; we appreciate that international travel and other reasons may make it difficult for some to attend. We are therefore also organising a series of online seminars; details to follow on our website in the new year. The languages of the conference will be English and Italian. There will be no conference fees and some travel subsidies are available; details to follow on acceptance of proposals.
Conference organising committee:
Charlotte Ross (Christ Church, University of Oxford, UK)
Silvia Antosa (University for Foreigners of Siena, Italy)
Paolo Frascà (University of Toronto, Canada)
Essential Critical Bibliography:
Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press 2006.
Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, Duke University Press 2010.
Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?”, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, XIII, 1 (2002), pp. 14-44.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, Routledge 2004.
Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers and the Queerness of Time. Duke University Press, 2012.
Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism”, in Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, Duke University Press 2002, p. 175-194.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke University Press 2004.
David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, Duke University Press 2010.
Carla Freccero. Queer/Early/Modern. Durham: Duke UP, 2016.
Elizabeth Freeman and Tyler Bradway (eds), Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form, Duke University Press 2022.
Jacqui Gabb and Janet Fink, Couple Relationships in the 21st Century Palgrave Macmillan 2015.
Susan Golombok, Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms, Cambridge University Press 2015.
Roberto Kulpa, Joanna Mizielinska, Agata Stasińska, “(Un)Translatable queer? Or what is lost, and can be found in translation”, in Sushila Mesquita et al., In: Import-Export-Transport: Queer Theory, Queer Critique and Activism in Motion. Sushila Mesquita, Maria Katharina Wiedlack and Katrin Lasthofer (eds.). Zaglossus, 2012.
James Heckert et al. (eds), Mapping Intimacies: Relations, Exchanges, Affects, Palgrave Macmillan 2013.
Stephen Hicks, Lesbian, Gay and Queer Parenting: Families, Intimacies, Genealogies, Palgrave Macmillan 2011.
Susan S. Lanser, ‘Comparatively lesbian: Queer/feminist theory and the sexuality of history. ACLA, 2015.er/
Valerie Lehr, Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myth of the Nuclear Family, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1999. Laura McKenzie, Age-Dissimilar Couples and Romantic Relationships: Ageless Love?, Palgrave Macmillan 2015.
Heather Love. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007
Joanna Mizielinska, Jacqui Gabb and Agata Stasinska (eds), Queer Kinship and Relationships, Special issue of Sexualities, XXI, 7 (2018).
Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Duke University Press 2007.
Sasha Roseneil, Isabel Crowhurst, Tone Hellesund, Ana Cristina Santos, and Mariya Stoilova (eds), The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe, UCL Press 2020.
Róisín Ryan-Flood, ‘Queer Lineage. On Generational Sexualities, LGBTQ Identity, and Visibility’. In Ryan-Flood and Amy Tooth Murphy (eds) Queering Desire. Lesbians, Gender and Subjectivities. Routledge, 2024.
David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship, University of Michigan Press 1984.
Kath Weston (ed.) Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, Columbia University Press 1991.