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Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2021

Tyler Bradway
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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.

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

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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.

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