Published in the Theory Q Series at Duke University Press

The contributors to this volume assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory. In a contemporary moment marked by the rising tides of neoliberalism, fascism, xenophobia, and homo- and cis-nationalism, they approach kinship as both a horizon and a source of violence and possibility. The contributors challenge dominant theories of kinship that ignore the devastating impacts of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and racialized nationalism on the bonds of Black and Indigenous people and people of color. Among other topics, they examine the “blood tie” as the legal marker of kin relations, the everyday experiences and memories of trans mothers and daughters in Istanbul, the outsourcing of reproductive labor in postcolonial India, kinship as a model of governance beyond the liberal state, and the intergenerational effects of the adoption of Indigenous children as a technology of settler colonialism. Queer Kinship pushes the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of queer theory forward while opening up new paths for studying kinship.

Click here to read the Introduction.

Contributors include: Aqdas Aftab, Leah Claire Allen, Tyler Bradway, Juliana Demartini Brito, Judith Butler, Dilara Çalışkan, Christopher Chamberlin, Aobo Dong, Brigitte Fielder, Elizabeth Freeman, John S. Garrison, Nat Hurley, Joseph M. Pierce, Mark Rifkin, Poulomi Saha, Kath Weston

“This brilliant collection is essential reading for anyone concerned with the surge of same-sex marriage and normative kinship and its consequences for the unmaking of racialized migrant families under global capital. Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman’s hard-hitting volume makes it clear that we need queer theory more than ever to understand the ongoing transformations and upheavals of family and kinship today.”

— David L. Eng, author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy

“Defining the ironies and ambivalences of both kinship-as-experience and the very idea of kinship itself, this collection does nothing less than reinvent kinship theory as a means of understanding how race, sexuality, nation, gender, history, and political economy are inextricably bound up together. I am aware of no other volume that works at these timely and provocative intersections as ambitiously and creatively as Queer Kinship.”

— Sarah Franklin, author of Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship

2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

After Queer Studies maps the literary influences that made queer theory possible, and it argues that queer literary studies has inspired some of the most foundational concerns in contemporary queer theory. Contesting narratives about queer theory being “over,” the collection demonstrates the ongoing vitality of queer literary studies, particularly to questions about sexuality, race, gender, power, history, and aesthetics.

Click here to read the Introduction.

“This is a must-read for scholars in the field, and a fantastic introduction to scholars looking for an entry point. Essential.”

—CHOICE

“After Queer Studies offers a reminder of how we might revisit what has been left out of our reading practices because certain texts have not traditionally come under the label ‘Literature’.”

—Notes and Queries

“After Queer Studies… emphasizes that we must both consider our present practices—the way we read, write, and relate to the world—and strive for utopian modes of being. Along the way, it reasserts the foundational bond queerness holds to the social and political world, and revitalizes our understandings of difference, community, materiality, and humanness.”

—Caliban: French Journal of English Studies

Reviewed in GLQ, Postmodern Culture, College Literature, European Journal of American Culture, Journal of Popular Romance Studies

Queer Experimental Literature (Palgrave, 2017; paperback 2019) argues that postwar writers queer the affective relations of reading through experiments with literary form. It theorizes “bad reading” as an affective politics that stimulates queer relations of erotic and political belonging in the event of reading. These incipiently social relations press back against legal, economic, and discursive forces that reduce queerness into a mode of individuality. Each chapter traces the affective politics of bad reading against moments when queer relationality is prohibited, obstructed, or destroyed—from the pre-Stonewall literary obscenity debates, through the AIDS crisis, to the emergence of neoliberal homonormativity and the gentrification of the queer avant-garde. Bradway contests the narrative that experimental writing is too formalist to engender a mode of social imagination. Instead, he illuminates how queer experimental literature uses form to redraw the affective and social relations that structure the heteronormative public sphere.

Click here to read the Introduction.

“Queer Experimental Literature is an exciting and powerful work with important implications for both queer theory and the study of contemporary literature… Offering theoretical insights in every chapter and a fresh perspective on each of its subjects, Queer Experimental Literature is a dazzling reminder that the discipline of queer literary studies can still produce bad readers as good as Bradway.”

— Postmodern Culture

“The care Bradway shows the texts and his nimble readings make Queer Experimental Literature a pleasure to read. This promises to be an essential text for anyone interested in experimental literature, queer theory, and affect studies.”

— GLQ

“Queer Experimental Literature’s bold exegeses of iconic figures in postwar culture are to be recommended to any scholar of contemporary letters.”

— College Literature

“Gorgeously expansive, Bradway’s book understands reading queer experimental literature as an experience of intensity that precipitates new ways of being relational and collective in advance of existing social forms.  Bradway’s own writing is both lush and lucid, and will doubtless constellate new readerships too.  If this is what bad reading gives us, I’m all in.”

— Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

“Tyler Bradway’s book is a bold and much-needed intervention on several fronts: queer theory, experimental writing, and affect studies. In incisive and spirited prose, it exposes tacit assumptions about what counts as good and bad reading and pushes current debates in new directions—the case for “queer exuberance” is especially powerful. A major resource for anyone concerned with the affective politics of reading.”

— Rita Felski, author of The Limits of Critique

“Tyler Bradway has written a beautiful, nuanced analysis of the power of queer experimental writing to elicit bad readings, readings that affirm the affects and bodily forces that texts can generate. Reading key texts by Acker, Burroughs, Delany, Winterson, and others affectively, Queer Experimental Literature affirms that some writings impact us, affect us, directly, generating new relations to ourselves and the world.”

— Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of the Human