Nonnormative and undertheorized practices of bonding, such as polyamory, situationships, open relationships, chosen families, and other fleeting intimacies, have increasingly participated in the contemporary critique of the genealogical and patriarchal notion of kinship. These relational dynamics raise broader questions about how belonging, care, and collective life are imagined, sustained, and contested, and through what aesthetic forms such relations become legible. 

While many of these questions have long animated queer studies, we continue to ask under what historical and material conditions alternative forms of relation become possible. From accounts of chosen kinship (Weston, 1991) and queer belonging (Freeman, 2007) to critiques of reproductive futurism (Edelman, 2004; Muñoz, 2009), scholars have established that kinship is made, not given—but it left underexamined the material and historical conditions under which some forms of relation are permitted to survive, and others are not. Black, feminist, and postcolonial scholarship has supplied that account, showing how race, colonialism, and state violence structure the very possibility of sociality and care (Hartman, 2008; Moten and Harney, 2013; Sharpe, 2016). Read together, these entangled genealogies suggest that kinship is neither natural nor simply chosen, but produced under specific conditions of constraint—which raises a further question: through what forms is that production visible or contestable? Recent criticism has turned to this question directly, treating relation itself as a formal and ethical problem, legible in structures of attachment (Berlant, 2022), relational form (Levine, 2015), queer kinship (Bradway and Freeman, 2022), and metarelationality and renarration as scenes of relational redress (Bradway, 2024). 

This seminar takes up the claim implicit in that third body of work: that aesthetic form is not merely a container for relations already understood politically or theoretically, but an active site where kinship, care, and collective life are organized, sustained, or foreclosed. We invite papers that place texts, media, and traditions in conversation (across periods, geographies, and media) around the forms of relation they construct, interrupt, or reinvent. Some of our guiding questions are:

• What aesthetic strategies organize attachment, dependency, care, obligation, and solidarity— and what do those strategies presume about who counts as kin?
• When kinship is imagined as contingent, recursive, or unfinished rather than genealogical, what new formal vocabularies become necessary to describe it?
• Across archives organized by race, gender, sexuality, disability, migration, ecology, and state violence, does a shared formal grammar of belonging emerge, or do these archives demand distinct formal languages?
• What kind of insights can literary and cultural analysis offer to contemporary debates on care, mutual aid, abolition, and collective survival that other disciplines cannot?