Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form

This talk contests the "anti-narrative" foundations of queer literary studies. Anti-narrativity understands narrative as a conservative form that abets heteronormativity by imposing coherence and linearity on subjectivity and meaning. By contrast, this talk reframes narrative as a relational form rife with affordances for figuring and sustaining queer bonds. I trace these affordances through contemporary queer kinship narratives that discover unexpectedly queer relations 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. Queer narrative theory thus emerges in this talk as a relational formalism well-suited to debates about the shapes queer belonging takes now.