Queer Theory and Kinship Studies

Catalog description

As a symbolic system and field of practice, kinship produces configurations of sexuality, gender, race and power embodied by persons. This recognition is indebted to critical race, feminist, postcolonial and queer interventions in the field of kinship studies. In this course we will review key texts in this field beginning with classic anthropological theories of kinship. We will consider the variability of sanctioned arrangements of sexuality, procreation, household labor and economy across the historical and ethnographic record. Focusing on this variation, we will pose relatedness as a question. Which lives, forms of desire, modes of embodiment are enabled, and which are abjected through the grammar of kinship at work in a particular place and time? What possibilities of life lie outside dominant kinmaking practices? What pleasures and what costs does exile from kinship entail?