Kidless Lit: Childlessness, Children, and Minor Kinship Forms

Item Restricted to University of Alberta Users

Communities and Collections

Usage

Author(s) / Creator(s)
- Hurley, Nat
SSRHC IG awarded 2021: "Kidless Lit" seeks to expand and historicize the existing conversations about childlessness in both popular and scholarly discourses. In order to address both popular and scholarly audiences about this topic of great public interest, the project foregrounds writing as both an object of study and mode of knowledge production. The goal is to understand childlessness as an archive, a conceptual apparatus, and a site of kinship experimentation in three key areas of American cultural production: (1) in the contemporary moment, with its explosion of U.S. texts about childlessness; (2) the history of this moment extending back to the late 19th century; and (3) the theoretical texts across the fields of queer theory, critical race theory, and social theory that furnish us with the concepts for making sense of childlessness. Ultimately this project explores the ways in which stories of childlessness and the minor kinship forms they inspire can be sites of social innovation and public goods---not causes of panic or alarm. The "Kidless Lit," research project will complete the first humanities-based study of childlessness, by addressing it through narrative and kinship forms that spring up around childless persons.
Date created

09/25/2020
Subjects / Keywords
Type of Item

Research Material
DOI

https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-xjbv-h356