Freedom's Fluctuations: Queer Relationality and Contemporary American Fiction 16 views

Freedom is perhaps the most quintessential American ideal—and the one most visibly marred by histories of enslavement, racial discrimination, Indigenous displacement, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. This project argues that we must revise our rubrics for freedom. Contemporary fiction proves an especially fruitful site for doing so: novels invite us to consider the ethical and affective force of our attachments as well as the value of our bonds. What happens to freedom when trans and queer subjects can’t or won’t refuse their attachments, even those that are phobic or even hostile? My dissertation, Freedom’s Fluctuations: Queer Relationality and Contemporary American Fiction, answers this question by tracing how fiction reorients us to ourselves and to others. Roving across feminist theories of relational autonomy, queer theory, trans studies, critical phenomenology, existentialist philosophy, and philosophy of mind, I ford a vision of freedom as fluctuating, socially shaped, and almost always marked by ambivalence. After outlining the theoretical and methodological stakes of my project in an introductory chapter, I survey six contemporary American novels. My first chapter centers on the relationship between home and homophobia, reading Carter Sickels’s The Prettiest Star (2020) and Bryan Washington’s Memorial (2020) so as to reframe queer antisociality within the ambit of familial bonds. In the second chapter, I focus on the complexities inhering between one’s desire and one’s obligations, probing the triadic dynamics in Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby (2021) and Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service (2022). My third and final chapter takes up two experimental metafictions: Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X (2023) and Justin Torres’s Blackouts (2023) to examine the existential possibilities of self and story. I conclude with a brief Coda, pointing to future directions in which I’d like this project to grow.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

freedom; American fiction; queer theory; queer literature

English

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2026-04-24