Throuple Plots: Narratives Infrastructures of Queer Kinship - a talk with Prof Teagan Bradway (SUNY)

Throuple Plots: Narrative Infrastructures of Queer Kinship

This talk examines "throuple plots" in contemporary LGBTQ literature and popular culture, which narrate relationships among three people working together to coordinate sex, desire, and intimacy. Throuple plots challenge foundational cis- and heteronormative narrative structures, such as the love triangle and cheating plot, and innovate relational forms for non-monogamous bonds across differences in race, gender, and class. Through these texts, I trace how kinship is becoming increasingly queer as the white, middle-class, and heterosexual nuclear family recedes as a cultural ideal. 

Teagan Bradway (she/they) is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. Bradway is the author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading (Palgrave, 2017; paperback 2019). 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’s articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, GLQ, MLQ, Biography, Textual Practice, College Literature, ASAP/J, Stanford Arcade, Studies in the Fantastic, Mosaic, and The Nation as well as various collections on contemporary literature and queer theory. Currently, Bradway is writing a book on queer forms of relationality and editing “Unaccountably Queer,” a special issue of differences that will mark the 20th anniversary of Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005).

This event is co-hosted by UCD Centre for Gender, Feminisms & Sexualities (CGFS) and The Trans* Research Association of Ireland (TRAI)

Thanks to UCD School of English, Drama & Film and to UCD Humanities Institute for supporting this event.