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Hurst

Teagan Bradway Hurst Talk - "Bodies That Gather: How to Practice and Sustain Queer Kinship"

Teagan Bradway is Professor of English at SUNY Cortland and a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University for 2025-26. In 2024, Bradway was a Hunt-Simes Visiting Junior Chair of Sexuality Studies with the Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney. She is the author of "Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading" (Palgrave, 2017) and she is currently completing a book on queer forms of engroupment and co-writing “Endless Love” with the late Elizabeth Freeman.

Conservative fears about queerness and transness are intimately bound up with anxieties about the erosion of the traditional patriarchal family. These fears are not unfounded. In the United States, kinship is becoming increasingly queer. More and more people are departing from cis-heteronormative plots for monogamy, reproduction, and long-term commitment—including those who do not identify as LGBTQIA+. To trace this cultural shift, this talk examines "throuple plots" in contemporary LGBTQ+ literature and popular culture, which narrate relationships among three people working together to coordinate sex, intimacy, and care. Throuple plots challenge foundational cis- and heteronormative narrative structures, particularly the marriage plot, the love triangle and the cheating plot, and they innovate queerer forms for sustaining non-monogamous bonds across differences in race, sexuality, gender, class, and ability. Moving across three distinct genres (sitcom, memoir, and novel), I trace how throuple plots reckon with the ways that queer and trans kinships are both threatened and idealized by cis-heteronormative culture. I conclude that queer kinship narratives can help us to confront the gaps between abstract political ideals, like “queer community,” and the messy, often-imperfect ways we actually live and practice queer kinship in the world.