Overview
Teagan Bradway is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator of English at SUNY Cortland. She is a queer theorist and scholar of LGBTQ+ and experimental literatures. Her work examines how queer kinship takes shape and endures through aesthetic and affective labor. She is particularly fascinated by the ways LGBTQ+ people sustain social worlds through storytelling and other narrative practices. She is the author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading (2017) and co-editor of Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (2022) and After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century. Bradway is also the guest editor of 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. Bradway’s articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, GLQ, MLQ, Textual Practice, ASAP/J, The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature, the Routledge Companion to Literature and Politics, and The Nation. In 2024, Bradway was a Hunt-Simes Visiting Junior Chair of Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney. Currently, Bradway is completing a book on queer engroupment and co-writing “Endless Love” with the late Elizabeth Freeman. Bradway has designed and taught 28 different courses at all levels. Her favorite courses to teach include Queer and Trans Narrative Theory, LGBTQ+ Literature, Reading for Form, Vibe Shifts in Contemporary Fiction, Psychology in Literature, and the Politics of Horror Cinema.
Research Focus
Sustaining Groups: Queer Kinship and the Practice of Attachment
How do queer people make kin in a straight world? Why are straight people increasingly adopting LGBTQ+ forms of kinship, such as throuples, polycules, and chosen families? And what can these small-scale engroupments teach queer studies about the practice of sustaining attachments more broadly? Generally, queer theory zooms between the micro— the body’s gestures, moments of psychological rupture, stylistic flourishes—and the macro—the political unconscious, or imaginations of queer “collectivity” that are diffuse and indistinct. Between these scales lies the small group, where most queer and trans people experience and enjoy queerness as an intimate social relation. My project, Sustaining Groups: Queer Kinship and the Practice of Attachment, theorizes queer and trans engroupments that flourish between the individual and the collective, such as mentors, platonic partners, friendship squads, affinity groups, and polycules. To do so, I examine contemporary queer kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, and television. I demonstrate how LGBTQ+ culture appropriates relational forms, including politically suspect ones—military squads, religious cults, legislative committees—and reimagines their affordances in queerer terms. Crucially, queer kinship narratives reveal the mundane practices of care that hold LGBTQ+ people together in the face of violence, stigma, and precarity. Departing from queer scholarship that affirms ephemerality, I argue for more attention to queer persistence. In particular, I trace how queer engroupments maintain solidarity over time, despite personal antagonism, ideological disagreement, and psychological exhaustion. Finally, I contend that queer relational forms have political significance beyond LGBTQ+ communities. Indeed, as neoliberalism erodes the material foundations of heteronormativity, we are witnessing a mass cultural experimentation with queer forms of kinship by cis- and straight-identified people. Thus, queer practices of attachment have much to teach us about nurturing social interdependency in ways that counter the hyper-individualism of the neoliberal present