Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-5qg8f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-13T07:24:37.446Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2021

Tyler Bradway
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay contests the antinarrative foundations of queer literary studies. Antinarrativity understands narrative as a conservative form that abets heteronormativity by imposing a coherence and linearity on subjectivity and meaning. By contrast, this essay reframes narrative as a relational form rife with affordances for figuring and sustaining queer bonds. I trace these affordances through contemporary queer kinship narratives, including Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, and Renee Gladman's Calamities. These texts reveal unexpectedly queer potentials within address, contiguity, closure, and even linearity, which queer theory misses when it defines narrative as inherently teleological and when it locates queerness primarily in transgressive ruptures. This essay discovers queerness instead within mundane and messy attachments that endure across time and space. Queer narrative theory thus emerges in this essay as a relational formalism well-suited to debates about the shapes queerness takes now.

Information

Type
Essays
Information
PMLA , Volume 136 , Issue 5 , October 2021 , pp. 711 - 727
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

I am deeply grateful to Caroline Levine, Jennifer Spitzer, Brian Glavey, Jonathan Culler, Megan Cole Paustian, Laura Davies, Cori McKenzie, and Carolyn Sorisio, as well as to audiences at Cornell University, West Chester University, and Durham University, for their generative feedback. This argument began as a presentation for Robyn Warhol and Amy Shuman's Project Narrative seminar, Queer and Feminist Narrative Theories, held at Ohio State University in 2017. Thank you to the organizers and participants for their insight and encouragement.

References

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Amin, Kadji. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Duke UP, 2017.Google Scholar
Amin, Kadji, et al. “Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social.” ASAP/Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017, pp. 227–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anker, Elizabeth S., and Felski, Rita. Introduction. Critique and Postcritique, edited by Felski and Anker, Duke UP, 2017, pp. 1–28.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 2007.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren, and Edelman, Lee. Sex; or, The Unbearable. Duke UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlant, Lauren, and Warner, Michael. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 547–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. Columbia UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Bradway, Tyler. Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler.” Art Forum, Nov. 1992, pp. 82–89.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2007.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Routledge, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chu, Andrea Long, and Drager, Emmett Harsin. “After Trans Studies.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 1, 2019, pp. 103–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Duke UP, 2017.Google Scholar
Clarke, Adele, and Haraway, Donna, editors. Making Kin Not Population. Prickly Paradigm, 2018.Google Scholar
Cooper, Ashton, et al. “Queer Abstraction: A Roundtable.” ASAP/Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017, pp. 285–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Currah, Paisley, and Stryker, Susan, editors. Making Transgender Count. Special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 1, 2015.Google Scholar
Dean, Tim. Beyond Sexuality. U of Chicago P, 2000.Google Scholar
Dean, Tim. Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking. U of Chicago P, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” GLQ, vol. 17, nos. 2–3, 2011, pp. 243–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D'Emilio, John. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Abelove, Henry et al. , Routledge, 1993, pp. 467–76.Google Scholar
Dimock, Wai Chee. “Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín, and W. B. Yeats.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 39, no. 4, 2013, pp. 732–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Duke UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Dinshaw, Carolyn, et al. “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion.” GLQ, vol. 13, nos. 2–3, 2007, pp. 177–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dodge, Harry. My Meteorite; or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing. Penguin Books, 2020.Google Scholar
Doyle, Jennifer, and Getsy, David J.. “Queer Formalisms: Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy in Conversation.” Art Journal, vol. 74, no. 4, 2013, pp. 58–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drabinski, Kate. “Incarnate Possibilities: Female to Male Transgender Narratives and the Making of Self.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 44, no. 2, 2014, pp. 304–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Beacon Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Duke UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Eng, David L., and Kazanjian, David, editors. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. U of California P, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fawaz, Ramzi. “Stripped to the Bone: Sequencing Queerness in the Comic Strip Work of Joe Brainard and David Wojnarowicz.” ASAP/Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017, pp. 335–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Rabinow, Peter, New Press, 1997, pp. 135–40.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Hurley, Robert, Vintage Books, 1990.Google Scholar
Fournier, Lauran. “Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice.” Auto/biography Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2018, pp. 643–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraiman, Susan. Cool Men and the Second Sex. Columbia UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeman, Elizabeth. Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century. Duke UP, 2019.Google Scholar
Freeman, Elizabeth. “Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory.” A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, edited by Haggerty, George E. and McGarry, Molly, Wiley Blackwell, 2007, pp. 295–314.Google Scholar
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Freeman, Elizabeth. The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Duke UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Gallop, Jane. Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus. Duke UP, 2019.Google Scholar
Getsy, David J. Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender. Yale UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Gill-Peterson, Jules. Histories of the Transgender Child. U of Minnesota P, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gladman, Renee. Calamities. Wave Books, 2016.Google Scholar
Gladman, Renee. Prose Architectures. Wave Books, 2017.Google Scholar
Gladman, Renee. “The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture.” Tripwire, vol. 15, 2019, pp. 91–110.Google Scholar
Glavey, Brian. The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis. Oxford UP, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Jack. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. U of California P, 2018.Google Scholar
Hanson, Ellis. “Kink in Time.” b2o, vol. 1, no. 2, 2016, www.boundary2.org/2016/10/ellis-hanson-kink-in-time/.Google Scholar
Harney, Stefano, and Moten, Fred. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.Google Scholar
Harper, Philip Brian. Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture. New York UP, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W. W. Norton, 2019.Google Scholar
Huffer, Lynne. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex. Columbia UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Hurley, Natasha. Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel. U of Minnesota P, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ioanes, Anna. “Scroll+Assemble+Repair: Reading The Argonauts.” ASAP/Journal, 29 Nov. 2018, asapjournal.com/scrollassemblerepair-reading-the-argonauts-anna-ioanes/.Google Scholar
Jagose, Annamarie. Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence. Cornell UP, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” Fundamentals of Language, Mouton de Gruyter, 1971, pp. 67–96.Google Scholar
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Kim, Sue J. On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative. U of Texas P, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornbluh, Anna. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. U of Chicago P, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lanser, Susan S. “Queering Narrative Voice.” Textual Practice, vol. 32, no. 6, 2018, pp. 923–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lanser, Susan S. “Toward a Feminist Narratology.” Style, vol. 20, no. 3, 1986, pp. 341–63.Google Scholar
Lanser, Susan S. “Toward (a Queerer) More (Feminist) Narratology.” Warhol and Lanser, 23–42.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Levinson, Marjorie. “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 2, Mar. 2007, pp. 558–69.Google Scholar
Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. Bloomsbury, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Love, Heather. “Playing for Keeps.” GLQ, vol. 25, no. 2, 2019, pp. 257–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Love, Heather. “The Queerness of Everyday Life.” Feminist Formations, vol. 28, no. 2, 2016, pp. 169–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Love, Heather. “Wedding Crashers.” GLQ, vol. 13, no. 1, 2007, pp. 125–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucey, Michael. Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust. Duke UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Mayer, So. “Medea's Perineum.” Angelaki, vol. 23, no. 1, 2018, pp. 188–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCallum, E. L. Unmaking the Making of Americans: Toward an Aesthetic Ontology. State U of New York P, 2019.Google Scholar
McCallum, E. L., and Tuhkanen, Mikko, editors. Queer Times, Queer Becomings. State U of New York P, 2011.Google Scholar
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York UP, 2006.Google Scholar
McRuer, Robert, and Mollow, Anna, editors. Sex and Disability. Duke UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Miller, D. A. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Miller, Nancy K. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction.” PMLA, vol. 96, no. 1, Jan. 1981, pp. 36–48.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Kaye. “Feral with Vulnerability: On The Argonauts.” Angelaki, vol. 23, no. 1, 2018, pp. 194–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moten, Fred. “Afterword.” Gladman, Prose Architectures, pp. 109–14.Google Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Nelson, Maggie. “Riding the Blinds: Micah McCrary Interviews Maggie Nelson.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 26 Apr. 2015, lareviewofbooks.org/article/riding-the-blinds/.Google Scholar
Nelson, Maggie. “What's Queer Form Anyway? An Interview with Maggie Nelson.” By Annie DeWitt, The Paris Review, 14 June 2018, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/14/an-interview-with-maggie-nelson/.Google Scholar
Ohi, Kevin. Henry James and the Queerness of Style. U of Minnesota P, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paige, Abby. “Queering the Momoir.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 26 Apr. 2015, lareviewofbooks.org/article/queering-the-momoir/.Google Scholar
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Pearl, Monica B. “Theory and the Everyday.” Angelaki, vol. 23, no. 1, 2018, pp. 199–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez, Roy. “Homo-Narrative Capture, Racial Proximity, and the Queer Latino Child.” Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, edited by Donahue, Jim et al. , Ohio State UP, 2017, pp. 193–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Benderson, Bruce, Feminist Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. Columbia UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Punday, Daniel. Narrative Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Narratology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reid, Tiana. “The Shape of Poetics to Come: On Taking Up the Task of Criticism.” American Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 1, 2018, pp. 139–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rifkin, Mark. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. Oxford UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roach, Tom. Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement. State U of New York P, 2012.Google Scholar
Rodríguez, Juana María. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. New York UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Rohy, Valerie. Chances Are: Contingency, Queer Theory, and American Literature. Routledge, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohy, Valerie. Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory. Oxford UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Rohy, Valerie. “Queer Narrative Theory.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by Garrett, Matthew, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 169–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roof, Judith. Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. Columbia UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Saint-Amour, Paul. “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 5, no. 1, 2018, modernismmodernity.org/articles/weak-theory-weak-modernism.Google Scholar
Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York UP, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Duke UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust. Edited by Goldberg, Jonathan, Duke UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seitler, Dana. “Suicidal Tendencies: Notes toward a Queer Narratology.” GLQ, vol. 25, no. 4, 2019, pp. 599–616.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Christina. “Lose Your Kin.” The New Inquiry, 16 Nov. 2016, thenewinquiry.com/lose-your-kin/.Google Scholar
Silbergleid, Robin. “In Pieces: Fragmentary Meditations on Queer Mother Memoirs and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts.” Genders, vol. 1, no. 2, 2016, www.colorado.edu/genders/2017/04/19/pieces-fragmentary-meditations-queer-mother-memoirs-and-maggie-nelsons-argonauts.Google Scholar
Snediker, Michael D. Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. U of Minnesota P, 2008.Google Scholar
Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. U of Minnesota P, 2017.Google Scholar
Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law. Duke UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 64–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stacey, Jackie. “On Being a Good-Enough Reader of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts.” Angelaki, vol. 23, no. 1, 2018, pp. 204–08.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child; or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Warhol, Robyn. Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop Culture Forms. Ohio State UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Warhol, Robyn. “Making ‘Gay’ and ‘Lesbian’ into Household Words: How Serial Form Works in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 40, no. 3, 1999, pp. 378–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warhol, Robyn, et al. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Ohio State UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Warhol, Robyn, and Lanser, Susan S., editors. Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Ohio State UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Weiner, Joshua J., and Young, Damon. “Queer Bonds.” GLQ, vol. 17, nos. 2–3, 2011, pp. 223–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weston, Kath. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Columbia UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Wiegman, Robyn. “In the Margins with The Argonauts.” Angelaki, vol. 23, no. 1, 2018, pp. 209–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winnett, Susan. “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure.” PMLA, vol. 105, no. 3, May 1990, pp. 505–18.Google Scholar
Young, Tory, editor. Queer and Feminist Theories of Narrative. Special issue of Textual Practice, vol. 32, no. 6, 2018.Google Scholar