Group Work: How to Practice and Sustain Queer Kinship

A lecture by Teagan Bradway, with formal response by Jacob Engelberg and moderation by Eugenie Brinkema, organized by Queer Formalism.

To register, send an e-mail to queerformalism@gmail.com, with your name, student number,  and institutional affiliation. If you want the ECT, please say so in your email.

Also see Professor Bradway’s masterclass on “Queer and Trans Narrative Theory” at Leiden University, on June 2.

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), Teagan Bradway traces how throuple plots reckon with the ways that queer and trans kinships are both threatened and idealized by cis-heteronormative culture. She concludes 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 live and practice queer kinship in the world.

After Teagan Bradway’s lecture (±45min), Jacob Engelberg will offer a formal response (±15min), after which we will have time for questions and a discussion of the material, moderated by Eugenie Brinkema.

The next day, on June 2, 13:00-17:00, Professor Bradway hosts a masterclass on “Queer and Trans Narrative Theory” at Leiden University, Lipsius building, room 1.48, organized by Looi van Kessel and Liesbeth Minnaard. Those interested in attending the masterclass, for which you can earn an additional 1 or 2 ECT(s), sign up by writing to [e-mail address] and click here [hyperlink] for the full announcement.

Teagan Bradway (she/her) 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). Bradway is co-editor (with Elizabeth Freeman) of Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (Duke, 2022) and (with E.L. McCallum) of After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century (Cambridge, 2019), which won a CHOICE award. Bradway guest edited “Unaccountably Queer” (2024), a special issue of differences, and “Lively Words: The Politics and Poetics of Experimental Writing” (2019), a special issue of College Literature. Her essays have appeared in venues such as PMLA, GLQ, MLQ, Textual Practice, ASAP/J, Biography, and The Nation as well as numerous collections on queer literature. Currently, Bradway is completing a book entitled “Group Work: How to Practice Queer and Trans Kinship,” and co-writing "Endless Love: Reading, Care, and the Work of Repair” with the late Elizabeth Freeman.

Jacob Engelberg is Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression (2026), published in the Camera Obscura series from Duke University Press. Engelberg has published articles in the Journal of Bisexuality and in Porn Studies, where he edited the special issue “Bisexuality and Pornography” (2024). Across several edited collections, Engelberg has authored essays on Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, the figure of the dybbuk in transnational horror cinemas, bisexual video pornography, and extreme found footage horror film. His current research projects include an exposition on the affordances of video hapticity in mediating violence against the body, reflections on the formal commitments of gape pornography, and investigations into the capacities of the triangle for modelling sexual relationalities. Engelberg sits on the editorial boards of the Porn Studies journal and the Routledge book series Screening Cinema.

Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, status-only Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, and affiliated faculty at the University of Amsterdam. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals and her books include The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), both published with Duke University Press.

Queer Formalism convenes each spring for public and accredited sessions on queer theory and aesthetic inquiry. Keep an eye out on this website and social media for more upcoming sessions.

Students can earn 1 ECT by

• reading Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman’s “Introduction: Kincoherence/Kin-Aesthetics/Kinematics” (22 pages), from the 2022 volume Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form,
• reading Freeman’s “Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory” (20 pages), a chapter in the 2007 volume A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies,
• preparing a discussion question for the Q&A segment of the lecture, based on these readings,
• and attending the lecture.

The readings will be distributed upon registration.