queer Kin
Course Description
What is a family, and who can be part of one? Who counts as a family member? Is your family your family for life? Are pets family? Are friends? In this course, we’ll approach these questions by looking at a range of texts from the seventeenth century to the present. We’ll be interested in the diverse and creative ways in which people have worked to build kinship networks for themselves outside of traditional or given models. Throughout, we’ll look to queer and feminist scholarship for insights into the reality and possibility of “chosen families”—families that we make, but are not necessarily born into. In this course, we’ll explore the long history of chosen families—and we’ll look to see how works of literature have both represented and actually maintained these sets of relationships.
The course begins with the creation of the first family in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. From there, we’ll look at a variety of friendship poems from the Renaissance on. We’ll consider the Classical ideal of the pure male friendship, and we’ll compare it with Katherine Philips’s poems addressed to female friends in place of male lovers. We’ll then turn to Jonathan Swift’s series of poems addressed to his friend “Stella” on her birthday and to the Wordsworths’ circle, including their many poems, letters, and journals—a set of literary documents that are also the record of complex, intimate relationships. The course rounds out in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with several queer (and also multispecies) texts: the documentary Grey Gardens (about a mother-daughter duo living in a derelict mansion, along with cats and vermin); Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir), and selections from Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties.
Assignments
This is an introductory, writing intensive course that involves both regular, weekly writing and three more substantial writing assignments.
Weekly writing – Each week, students respond to a prompt or question, or they practice a particular writing skill. They might do a close reading of an assigned passage, which would then serve as the basis for class discussion; they might respond to a particular interpretive question, which is designed to help them practice argumentation; or they might practice writing in a particular communicative mode (e.g., write a reading response but in the form of a letter to a close friend). This last sort of task is meant to help students recognize that acts of writing involve questions both of audience and medium. It is also meant to generate engagement by embedding course content in students’ own social and media networks. Finally, these regular writing assignments allow me to assess students’ writing and to offer feedback on their progress.
Two essays – The course requires two short essays. The first guides students through the process of close reading and asks them to develop an analytical question or problem through their close reading. For this paper, students will not write a thesis statement. Rather, they’ll focus on learning how to pose an interesting question, which emerges from their close reading of a text. The second essay is an argumentative essay based on close reading. As preparation for this assignment, students will workshop their first essays in class. They’ll work together to develop a thesis statement that responds to the question they posed in those first essays.
Creative “essay” – The third substantial writing assignment in this course asks students to reflect on their own kinship network by emulating some feature of a course text. Students will also write a short reflection about why they chose the form or genre of writing they chose, and how that form/genre impacted the content of their piece.