How do aesthetic objects—literature, art, music, etc.—forge queer and trans bonds that reshape our understanding of what counts as “kinship?” To answer this question, this panel traces how African American, Indigenous, and Black diasporic aesthetic practices from the 19th to the 21st century contest the white supremacist underpinnings of the heteronormative family. In doing so, the panelists recenter contemporary kinship theory on the vital entwinement of kinship with race, sexuality, and aesthetic form.

This panel builds on foundational theories of queer kinship, including Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” (1975), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985), Kath Weston’s Families We Choose (1991), and Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim (2000). In an effort to map the histories of racialization that underlie queer kinship, the panelists put these works in conversation with queer of color kinship theory, such as Richard T. Rodríguez’s Next of Kin (2009), David L. Eng’s The Feeling of Kinship (2010), Juana María Rodríguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014), and Brigitte Fielder’s Relative Races (2020). Queer of color kinship theory presses back against a tendency toward idealism within some narrations of queer belonging, which occlude the racialized violence that infuses the state’s deployment of normative kinship.

Despite a flourishing of attention to the politics of queer kinship over the past decade, there remains a dearth of scholarship focused specifically on the role of aesthetics in creating, sustaining, and extending intimate bonds over time. Indeed, insofar as kinship is kinaesthetic—a social practice and a symbolic system—literary studies is key to analyzing and critiquing the genres, figures, and forms that make sense of our relationships. Accordingly, all of these proposed papers take up the literary, including short stories by Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Zitkála-Šá and novels by Jackie Kay and Brandon Hobson, to explore how belonging, affiliation, ancestry, and descent are transformed by the artistic practices of Black and Indigenous people.

In a collaborative presentation, Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman outline the long shadow that structuralist approaches to kinship continue to cast over queer and kinship theory. They propose a theory of kinaesthetics: kinship as both a social practice and a symbolic system. Kinaesthetics productively disrupts kinship studies, dominated by anthropology, in its attention to matters traditionally understood in terms of art and performance--form, context, and embodiment. Bradway and Freeman stress the urgency of kinaesthetic methods within a contemporary political moment of resurgent white nationalisms, which weaponize the aesthetics of kinship to shore up the white, hetero-patriarchal family. They thus set the stage for the panelists to unfold earlier historical moments of racialized kinship, which endure in the present, and to trace BIPOC kinaesthetic practices that engender queer and trans modes of belonging.

Building on her work in Relative Races (2020), Brigitte Fielder explores such practices by looking to the Harlem Renaissance author Alice Dunbar-Nelson, discovering in her work a “racialized version of mixed-race self-begetting.” By attending to moments of paradoxical self-begetting, Fielder uncovers queer genealogies of interracial kinship taking place on the terrain of the aesthetic, which contest notions of racial reproduction as purely biological. She theorizes the mixed-race self-begetting in Dunbar Nelson’s story as a queer act of self-reproduction, aesthetic creation, and racial performance of masculinity.

Drawing on contemporary Indigenous theorizations—storytelling, praxis, literature, and art—Joseph M. Pierce’s presentation maintains that the work of relating to the celestial, what Cree theorist Karyn Recollet calls “kinstillatory praxis,” offers routes of belonging that expand beyond the limits of colonial normativity. Drawing on the work of Yankton Sioux writer Zitkála-Šá, Cherokee novelist Brandon Hobson, and Yupik dancer/choreographer Emily Johnson, he shows how the movements of stars (their ruptures and becomings) offer methods of connection across difference that can help reframe what it means to be a good relative.

Finally, Adqas Aftab develops a Black trans hermeneutic that reconceptualizes transness through relationality, diasporic kinship, and ecstasy rather than visuality, individuality and materiality. Through a close reading of Jackie Kay’s Black Scottish novel Trumpet, Aftab argues that speculative kinship ties can create a desire to constantly “become” the gendered figure that one is in relation with. In doing so, Aftab retheorizes transness, not as medicalized dysphoria or anti-normative gender deviance, but as the rhizomatic and relational movement of gender, speculation, memory, and affect cutting through time and space.

Taken together, the panel explores how kinship is at once a scene of violence—psychological, imperial, neoliberal, interpersonal—and of creativity. It is a technique for social exclusion and inclusion and a domain of aesthetic figuration that enables us to retrace the shapes that relationality might take.