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.

Contributors. 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

Tyler Bradway is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Cortland, and author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading.

Elizabeth Freeman is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and author of Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century, and other books also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: Kincoherence/Kin-aesthetics/Kinematics / Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman  1
Queering Linages
1. Kinship beyond the Bloodline / Judith Butler  25
2. The Mixed-Race Child Is Queer Father to the Man / Brigitte Fielder  48
3. World Making: Family, Time, and Memory among Trans Mothers and Daughters in Istanbul / Dilara Çalişkan  71
Kinship, State, Empire
4. In Good Relations: Native Adoption, Kinstillations, and the Grounding of Memory / Joseph M. Pierce  95
5. Queering the Womb: Surrogacy and the Economics of Reproductive Feeling / Poulomi Saha  119
6. Beyond Family: Kinship’s Past, Queer World Making, and the Question of Governance / Mark Rifkin  138
7. Ecstatic Kinship and Trans Interiority in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet / Aqdas Aftab  159
8. Marielle, Presente: The Present and Presence in Marielle Franco Protests / Juliana DeMartini Brito  180
Kinship in the Negative
9. Akinship / Christopher Chamberlin  203
10. Against Friendship / Leah Claire Allen and John S. Garrison  227
11. Kidless Lit: Childlessness and Minor Kinship Forms / Natasha Hurley  248
12. Till Death Do Us Kin: Sworn Kinship and Queer Martydom in Chinese Anti-imperial Struggles / Aobo Dong  269
Epilogue. How Did It Come to This? Talking Kinship with Kath Weston / Kath Weston, Elizabeth Freeman, and Tyler Bradway  291
References  303
Contributors  333
Index  339