Welcome to the Kinship in American Studies Conference Homepage!

- Including the 72nd annual DGfA meeting -

This conference sets out to shed new light on the meaning of kinship in American culture, history, and politics, thereby probing how many important social, political, and cultural phenomena can be understood through the idiom of kinship. The notion of kinship is understood here not only as a formalized status of belonging (marriage, genealogy, family memberships, etc.) but also as emerging practices of care, affiliation, and belonging that exist outside of formalized kinship ties. The conference seeks to explore the middle ground between these two. It thus follows the urgent call for more differentiated definitions of what kinship actually means within the specific context of American culture. 

Building on a large body of existing work that defines kinship as both an emancipatory practice of minoritized subjects and communities and as a site of biopolitical power of the state, the empire, settler colonialism, and white supremacy, this conference invites panels that bring together American studies and critical kinship studies, with a particular focus on the forms, politics, receptions, historicitiy, and representations of kinship. The conference features critical discussions of kinship in literature, film, TV, theater, series, music, museums, social media, archives, and other artistic and cultural forms of expression and theorizations of these possible objects of study from queer, feminist, critical race theorist, and decolonial perspectives, including the following fields within American studies: dis/ability studies, Indigenous studies, Black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American and Pacific Island studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural materialism, affect studies, performance studies, and critical theory.