Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW)

INSTITUTE OF MODERN LANGUAGES RESEARCH

School of Advanced Study • University of London

 

Queer Homemaking II
https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/24075

 

Friday 19 November 2021

15:00-16:00 GMT 

Seminar/Reading Group 

 

Organisers: Francesco Albé and Stephanie Ng (Cambridge)

 

This seminar sets to apply the theoretical explorations discussed in the previous session to the analysis of two literary texts: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Ausser Sich [Beside Myself] (2017). Nelson’s cross-genre memoir evokes the intimate negotiations of sexuality, bodily transformations, caretaking and family-making between the author and her transgender partner Harry. Salzmann’s debut novel follows Ali’s search for their missing brother, a journey into their Jewish-Russian family history and their multiple linguistic, cultural and gender identities. Both texts are deeply concerned with queer home-making as theorised by Ahmed, Fortier and Kilgard: searching for queerness both beyond and within heteronormative structures of kinship through a language that evades their exclusory and totalising allure. Central questions in this reading-group-style discussion will be: what literary strategies are employed to articulate new, queer ways of homemaking?  How can literature prompt us readers to read, see, feel differently?

Participants are kindly requested to read the following:

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015) – in particular, pp. 1-40 and pp. 87-102.
Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Ausser Sich (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017) – in particular, Chapter “Valja”, pp. 257-275 [German original]
Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Beside Myself, trans. by Imogen Taylor (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019) – in particular, Chapter “Valya”, pp. 221- 237. [English translation]

 

All are welcome to attend this free online event, starting at 15:00 GMT. You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. To register go to: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/24075

 

The next seminars in the Precarious Homes series ‘Neoliberalism, the Family, and Bourgeois Domesticity’, will take place on 10 Dec 2021 and 21 Jan 2022.

 

Precarious Homes – Narratives and Practices of Home-Making in Turbulent Times
This event series takes its cue from the CCWW Conference "'Where are you from?' to 'Where shall we go together?' Re-imagining Home and Belonging in 21st-Century Women's Writing", hosted at the IMLR in September 2020. Dedicated to further exploration of literary and theoretical conceptualisations of home-making, the series considers women’s writing in context, using various formats -  reading groups, a symposium, and an author/translator conversation. Programme of events (pdf)

 

INSTITUTE OF MODERN LANGUAGES RESEARCH

School of Advanced Study • University of London

Room 239 | Senate House | Malet Street | London WC1E 7HU | UK

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The School of Advanced Study at the University of London is the UK's national centre for the facilitation and promotion of research in the humanities and social sciences.