[IGALA] Call for papers: Queer Kinship Conference, 9-10 April 2025, University of Oxford.

Tue Jan 7 21:23:19 UTC 2025

Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to share the call for papers below, for the second
international conference on queer kinship, organised by Charlotte Ross
(University of Oxford), Silvia Antosa (University for Foreigners of Siena)
and Paolo Frascà (University of Toronto). Please see our website
<https://www.queerkinshipnetwork.com/home>
<https://www.queerkinshipnetwork.com/home>for further information about our
activities, which include a blog and an online seminar series.
Best wishes, Silvia Antosa

Silvia Antosa (PhD)
Associate Professor of English
Director, Centre for Foreign Languages (CLASS
<https://class.unistrasi.it/home.asp>)
Director, *TransCulture Book Series
<https://www.mimesisedizioni.it/catalogo/collana/880> *(Mimesis)
Co-Director, *AngloSophia Book Series
<https://www.mimesisedizioni.it/catalogo/collana/719> *(Mimesis)
Co-Director, Queer Kinship Network (Conference and Publication Series)
<https://www.queerkinshipnetwork.com/home>
Co-Director, *Queer Caucus of the American Association of Italian Studies
(AAIS*
<https://aais.italianstudies.net/site_page.cfm?pk_association_webpage_menu=11086&pk_association_webpage=22890>
)
https://unistrasi.academia.edu/SilviaAntosa

24 [image: Organisation-Lockup]

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
<https://www.queerkinshipnetwork.com/home> (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.

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
<http://www.thecybercenelab.org>, 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.

Please submit a 250-word abstract plus a brief bio (max 100 words), in
English or Italian, by 31st  January 2025, via this form
<https://forms.gle/jVUyDWECgnwBz7MY6>.

For any further information, please contact Charlotte Ross:
charlotte.ross at chch.ox.ac.uk

Speakers will receive a notification of confirmation by 15 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
<https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/comparatively-lesbian-queerfeminist-theory-and-sexuality-history-0>.
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.
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