CAPONEU Fictions of the Family Workshop University of Brighton, Wednesday 19th November 2025
3 Dorset Place, Kemptown, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN2 1ST (Rooms 501 and 201)
From ancient texts like Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus to contemporary works including Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, the family bears a fundamental relationship to fiction. As part of the EU Horizon/ UKRI funded project, The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe, this workshop sets out to explore the family as a specifically political fiction. In its heteropatriarchal form, the family has been a vital tool in the reproduction of colonialism and capitalism. Today, the authoritarian right mobilises fantasies of the nuclear family in peril to bolster oppressive structures of power. At the same time, exclusion from the heterosexist and white supremacist nuclear family, particularly for queer communities and those of colour, has led to a flourishing of ways of doing family otherwise that feed the political imagination. Today on the left, ‘family abolition’ has become a shorthand for the inequalities and insecurities of privatised reproduction and property, and a horizon for social transformation. At this time, engagements with the family increasingly take literary form, as fictional texts explore the psychosocial coordinates of different ways of doing, and being, family. Insisting on the political importance of fictional texts and the fictional character of politics, this workshop will centre, in all their forms, political fictions of, and against, the family, as well as those for different kinds of family, that seek to radically reconceive it.
Fictions of the Family Programme
8.30-9.00am: Registration (Dorset Place foyer)
9.00-9.15am: Welcome (Dorset Place 501)
9.15-10.30am: Keynote: Professor Clare Hemmings (LSE), Family Memory Archives
10.30-10.45am: Break
10.45-12.45pm: Parallel Panels A and B (See panel details)
Panel A: Psychosocial Dynamics (DP 501)
Panel B: Theories and Practices (DP 201)
12.45-1.45pm: Lunch and Exhibit (Edward St First Floor Gallery Space)
1.45-3.15pm: Creative Writing Workshop with Dr Sam Solomon (University of Sussex)
3.15-3.30pm: Break
3.30-5.30pm: Parallel Panels C and D (See panel details)
Panel C: Queer Kinships (DP 501) Panel D: Speech, Memory, Silence (DP 201)
5.30-6.00pm: Break
6.00-7.30pm: Roundtable and Open Mic with Dr Craig Jordan-Baker and Dr Bea Hitchman ‘Family, Endings and the Promise of Happiness’ (DP 501)
Panel Details and Abstracts
Panel A: Psychosocial Dynamics (10.45-12.45pm, DP 501)
Susie Christensen (University of Brighton)
‘Desire and reality in Miranda July’s All Fours and the psychoanalytic fiction of the family’
‘I was a throbbing, amorphous ball of light trying to get my head around a motherly, wifely human form,’ (July, 2024, p.215) says the narrator of Miranda July’s novel All Fours (2024). This novel offers a fiction of the family that diverges from the one offered to us by the heteropatriarchal norm and relatedly, by psychoanalysis. In allowing a woman’s desire to lead the way, All Fours depicts a version of the nuclear family transformed. The protagonist, led by her desire, reimagines her family in a way that foregrounds queer relationality, a more expansive version of sexuality and an alternative means of managing childcare within a family. It is a prime example of how a literary text can both reinvent the family and give voice to a feminist political position like nothing else. Perhaps because of this, All Fours has prompted a huge response. There are many reading groups dedicated to it springing up internationally both online and in person. Although it is an American novel, women across Europe have used the novel to support a feminist and political re-writing of what it means to be a woman and a mother in mid-life living in a family today. One of the questions this book poses is: what happens to the family when a woman tries to allow the ‘throbbing, amorphous’ light of desire guide her, rather than being led by the ‘motherly, wifely, human form’ that she has been trying to fit into? This paper will address both the novel and the responses to the novel to examine what re-imagined fiction of the family it might both depict and enable people to imagine. It will also consider how this novel challenges many ideas from psychoanalytic theory that are wrapped up in heteropatriarchal norms.
Jo Kellond (University of Brighton)
‘Isolated Care and Maternal Distress in Naomi Booth’s Raw Content’
Naomi Booth’s Raw Content (2025), examines the profound psychological impact of becoming a mother in contemporary late capitalism. Grace is a single woman working in legal publishing when she becomes pregnant with her first child. She has little experience with children and has given the prospect of becoming a mother little thought. After she gives birth, largely tasked with caring for the child alone, she soon descends into a state of psychic suffering, consumed with fears that some harm will come to her child. Drawing on queer and psychoanalytic feminism, this paper reads Raw Content as a critical intervention into debates around the psychopolitics of contemporary reproduction.
In recent years, ‘family abolition’ has become a shorthand for critiques of the nuclear family and the privatisation of care in late capitalism. Sophie Lewis (2022) characterises this type of family a “disciplinary, scarcity-based trauma-machine.” The concentration of responsibility for care on the intense relationships between (most often) biological parents and their children creates an often-fraught environment characterised by control and thwarted need. Lewis references the “oedipal kinship story” in which subjectivities form, which draws attention to the experiences of children. However, psychoanalytic thinkers have also written of the psychic effects of becoming a mother or birthing parent in the context of late capitalism. As Joan Raphael-Leffe puts it, “one consequence of post-industrial urbanisation is that due to social stratification, geographical mobility, breakdown of extended families and changing social mores, ‘westernised’ women often mother in isolation,” a situation that has profound effects on maternal mental health.
This paper reads Raw Content in this context, positioning the novel as a profound account and critique of the psychosocial effects on primary caregivers of the isolated organisation of care in the capitalist nuclear family.
Angie Voela (University of East London)
‘An island of strangers: gender, family and the stranger in Dimitra Kolliakou’s novel Kalypso’
In Hospitality – under compassion and violence (2013) French psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle argues that unconditional hospitality is inherent to the human condition, arising from our primordial nomadism. Radically forgotten and foreclosed by the advent of patriarchal order, nomadism is superseded by binaries such as inside and outside, host and guest (xenos or stranger), and family as nuclear unit, as opposed to relationality and openness. Unconditional hospitality, also the subject of Durourmantelle’s dialogic collaboration with Jacques Derrida, invites a radical rethinking of the house-family as point of reference, in at least two important ways: in relation to the host as master-father who may feel threatened and strives to protects the house against parricide and the stranger who might usurp his place (the Oedipus Rex overtones are evident); and in relation to belonging founded upon a claim of autochthony, that is, one’s right to land-citizenship by virtue of being native to a place — both fundamental to Ancient Greek myth and still influential in contemporary thought.
Household, intimacy and belonging, time and eternity, immortality and death, and the advent of the stranger are the subject matter of Dimitra Kolliakou’s Greek novel Kalypso. The immortal Kalypso, whose name means to veil, to conceal, lives on an island with her maids. The island is shrouded by a mist of uncertainty conveyed by the elliptical style of the narration and lack of clarity about everything: the disappearance of the maids or may be their suicide; immortality, which Kalyspo promises to her lover, the maid Melanthi; immutable mythical space-time, before law and juridical authority, and the arrival of present day refugee families.
A feminist psychoanalytic-philosophical of the family-island-intimacy-stranger complex allows us to radically contest concepts of gender and belonging from the perspective of ‘an impossible illicit geography of proximity that should not be opposed to an elsewhere come from outside and surrounding it, but “close to the close”, that unbearable orb of intimacy that melts into hate’ (2000:1).
Polina Whitehouse (University of Oxford)
‘Nonmonogamy on Mars: Relationship Norms in Utopian Method and Historical Context’
This paper illustrates the merits of utopian construction as a method of political thought for critiquing existing and imagining new norms of intimate relationships and subjects that enact them. I will situate this discussion in a context of sociopolitical contestation around such norms and subjects, from the pre-revolutionary years to the 1970s Soviet Union. The analysis will focus narrowly on a passage discussing nonmonogamy from Red Star, a utopian novel set in a communist society on Mars.
The 1979 edition removes nearly a page of material elaborating the reaction of the protagonist, Leonid, to finding out that his Martian lover, Netti, was previously romantically involved with two Martian men at once.[1] Leonid expresses a feeling of indescribable strangeness and introspects about the disconnect between his considered conclusions and his negative emotions.[2] My analysis will focus on the key role of subject formation, understood in a context of societal holism, in Bogdanov’s utopian vision and in utopia as a method of political thought more generally. I argue that relationships of mutual reinforcement and constitution among parts contribute to the stability of the social whole and to the difficulty of transition from one social order to another. The Martian polyamorous subject is formed in a relationship of mutual constitution and reinforcement with Martian economic conditions, missing from Earth. Leonid’s reaction illustrates cultural lag, which Bogdanov theorizes elsewhere: subjects formed in one social context face tension when entering new economic and cultural conditions. I draw on Neal Wood’s concept of the “human ideal”—he holds that political texts implicitly or explicitly construct a subject to populate their desired society—to reveal a context of political contestation over a gendered and relational ideal subject through the publication and censorship of Bogdanov’s work. [3] The reaffirmation of the family and the traditional maternal figure emerged as a response to Stalin-era material conditions; similar conditions reappeared in the 1970s. Thus, the government’s prevailing ideological approaches in those periods constructed a very different ideal woman from Bogdanov’s. Considering such subjects through the lends of utopian holism— situating them in (real or imagined) societies characterized by relations of mutual constitution and reinforcement among their elements—enables critique, comparison, and construction of visions of intimacy norms.
Panel B: Theories and Practices (10.45-12.45pm, DP 201)
Max Davies (University of Brighton)
‘The political act of feminist parenting, gender-neutral parenting, and gender-creative parenting: Transforming the future of society through child-rearing’
One’s sex and gender have long been used to uphold androcentric systems that limit access to power, rights, and mobility for women, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people. In the 1970s, second-wave feminists began challenging these structures. Influenced by social learning theory, they questioned biology as destiny and actively restructured their lives, encouraging their daughters to reject traditional gender roles and pursue wider opportunities usually reserved for the opposite sex. This gave rise to the feminist parenting movement.
Soon, feminists recognised that boys also needed to be liberated from rigid expectations. This led to gender-neutral parenting, which aimed to disrupt prescribed gender roles for both boys and girls. Parents created environments where children could explore diverse interests, hoping to raise individuals who have expansive opportunities, who would question and resist social inequalities rooted in traditional hierarchies.
However, even these approaches had limitations. Once children entered the public sphere, gendered norms often reasserted themselves due to parents continuing to use gender pronouns for their children. In response, gender creative parenting (GCP) emerged. GCP avoids assigning gender at birth and uses neutral pronouns, minimising gender socialisation both privately and publicly. These key principles allow children to explore their world with greater freedom, voice, choice and opportunities.
Together, these movements reveal how parenting can be a site of resistance and transformation. Through their choices, parents can reshape their children’s understanding of gender and challenge oppressive social structures. Parenting is not just personal—it is political.
This piece will offer a historical overview of these unconventional parenting styles, their core principles, and how they resist hegemonic norms and systems. It will showcase the power of parents in transforming the future of society through child-rearing.
Samuel Garrett and Elizabeth Vasileva (Loughborough University)
‘Kinship, desire and Oedipus’
This presentation explores how Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the Oedipal family frames a radical reconceptualisation of kinship beyond the nuclear family model. Drawing on Anti-Oedipus and its elaboration in recent scholarship (Laurie & Stark, 2012; Duschinsky et al., 2015), our starting position is that the family operates not merely as an affective or reproductive unit, but as a desiring-machine integrated into the broader flows of capitalist production. The nuclear family, far from being a “natural” social form, is revealed as a site where desire is territorialised, love privatised, and subjectivity formatted for the reproduction of capital (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). Rather than focusing on idealised alternatives or symbolic inclusivity, this paper highlights that the nuclear family is fictional – reproductive and care work is already socially disaggregated and diffused across paid and unpaid labour, state and private actors, biological and non-biological caregivers. This model interrupts the centrality of Oedipus and resists the abstraction of care into moral sentiment. Instead, it maps care as a processual, networked activity inseparable from economic and institutional conditions. This provides a framework for imagining alternative kinship structures not as a replacement for the nuclear family but as assemblages which interact with it in multiple productive ways whilst remaining subject to the same disciplinary forces.
Using Guattari’s notion of collective agents of enunciation, we explore examples of how group subjectivity emerges in nuclear family formations as ‘lines of flight’ (Thornton, 2020). Furthermore, we present some thoughts about what kinship can become under conditions of liberated desire and collective production. By reframing the family as a political assemblage and affective apparatus of control, this paper contributes to contemporary debates on family abolition, queer kinship, and post-representational relationality
Samu/elle Striewski (University of Oxford)
‘Battle of the Fairies: Queer Ethical Life in the Ruins of Recognition’
My presentation explores street drag collectivity as a subversive alternative to the hetero-patriarchal family. Grounded in an auto-ethnographic reflection on my own drag socialisation in Paris, Berlin, and New York—and informed by two years of co-editing a volume on, researching and participating in the contemporary drag scene in Germany—I revisit the figure of the Tunte: a uniquely German form of street drag that I identify with Susan Stryker as a trans* artistic practice.
In particular, I look at two key moments in the history of the Tunten movement. First, the so-called Tuntenstreit (Battle of the Fairies, if you will) of 1973—a heated ideological conflict within the West German gay movement between orthodox Marxists and gender-abolitionist feminists, which led to growing internal critique of (gay and non-gay) cis-masculinity. The Tunten emerged as the radical wing of the movement, experimenting with gender-nonconforming street drag and new modes of post-cis-male relationality. The second moment is the occupation of the so-called Tuntenhaus (House of the Fairies) by a punk, gender-abolitionist gay collective shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990—an experiment in cohabitation and alternative forms of sociality.
While the German gay liberation movement soon shifted toward state recognition (e.g., marriage and adoption rights), and drag got increasingly rendered recognizable as product of the cultural industry, my presentation seeks to recover fragments of a queer grammar of living together that derecognises, to use a term by Paul B. Preciado, the hegemonic language of intelligibility and instead engages in the poiesis of what Daniel Loick calls a countercultural ethical life.
My talk is embedded in a broader theoretical project that is interested in localising modes of queer recognition that are not focused on the state (as suggested by Axel Honneth’s philosophy of recognition), but instead align with up more Foucauldian/Butlerian and abolitionist impulses.
Lenore Todd (Leiden University College)
‘Abolish DINKS: The Childless Couple as a Capitalist Engine in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (2025)’
“They didn’t want children, didn’t want to move to a new city; inevitably it came down to money.” (77) Perfection, 2025
Willfully childfree couples occupy an ambiguous social position in Western culture. They can be villainized as selfish for opting out of parenthood, especially in an era of moral panic about declining birthrates. But these same couples can also be commended for their perceived environmental responsibility and envied for their disposable resources. The “DINK” (Dual-Income, No-Kids) lifestyle has become more common in recent years.
Despite their increasing prevalence, DINKs are not considered a complete family unit, either socially or academically. They are curiously omitted from Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022). Lewis critiques the nuclear family unit as the locus for privatizing care and reinforcing individual subjectivity at the expense of the collective. She also insists on children’s place “on the frontlines of imagining [family abolition]” (Lewis, 17). The alternative forms of family she notes include queer, Black, and other marginalized groups. Yet there is no mention of how the wide range of childfree families formed outside of struggle interact with capitalism.
This silence around childfree couples in the family abolition discourse is complicated by Vincenzo Latronico’s 2025 novella, Perfection. Written as an homage to George Perec’s 1965 work Things: A Story of the Sixties, Perfection follows Anna and Tom, a couple of “creatives” through their late twenties into their early thirties. When read alongside Lewis, Perfection makes it very clear that many of the detrimental properties Lewis attributes to the nuclear family can also apply to the childless family unit.
Anna and Tom are both victims and perpetrators of late capitalism. They operate as a complex closed unit as they navigate expat life and its attendant politics in Berlin. Their decision to remain childfree does not make them innocent, even by their left-leaning politics. In fact, their relative flexibility galvanizes their potential as gentrifiers. By combining Lewis and Latronico’s works, this paper seeks to challenge the silence surrounding childfree couples, as well as interrogate their potential to be co-opted by market forces.
Exhibits (Edward Street First Floor Gallery Space 12.45-1.45pm)
Sebastian Beaumont (University of Brighton)
Sculptural Representations of Queer Family
I am looking – in part – at how a community of resistance to homophobic legislation (Brighton Area Action Against Section 28) came into being in the late 80s, in which I was an active participant. As part of my project, I have been making spherical structures from stones gathered from Brighton beach to represent the way in which apparently disparate people in Brighton (represented by the separate pebbles from Brighton beach) came together to form a coherent and cohesive whole. These structures are both solid and fragile, delicate yet robust, and are a great metaphor for the way in which a successful family might operate (see photos below).
I have envisaged these sculptures as representing alternative family structures – a memorial / homage to these queer communities in Brighton. Using research based on archive material from the time, historical perspectives (Matthew Todd, Paul Baker, Terry Sanderson), as well as psychotherapeutic theory – particularly psychosynthesis (Firman and Gila) – I have allowed myself to organically manifest these ‘families’ in a tangible and personal way.
I have made five sculptures, each with a different take on sameness and difference, coherence and disparity / tension and feel that they are pleasingly articulate in their own non-verbal way.
Alice O’Malley-Woods (University of Brighton)
Willow: a poetic of disability and end-of-life care in the multispecies family
In the early spring of 2025, my companion dog was diagnosed with a degenerative nerve condition that is gradually paralysing her, and will ultimately be fatal. Simultaneously (and perhaps as a consequence) I experienced a significant flare up of my own chronic illnesses. In a very short time, we went from being long distance walkers, to a duo who could only manage a short turn around the nearest field. Increasingly, our walks became punctuated with rests under familiar trees, most regularly a willow tree. The willow soon became the target of our daily activity, and a way in which we could enjoy our time outside together despite our mutual and increasing disability.
Willow is a collection of poetry and abstract mark-making that documents these moments of sitting-with, presenting them as acts of care between loved-ones in a multispecies family unit. I propose to exhibit these works as a non-traditional contribution to “Fictions of the Family”. The works will be framed alongside a short exegesis to support a reading of them in the theoretical and political context of grief, bereavement, and end-of-life care in the multispecies family.
While the majority of British households are multispecies, due to a wider cultural ambivalence around the lives and relationships of non-human animals, companion-animals’ role as legitimate (rather than symbolic) family members has yet to be fully socially accepted (Irvine, 2017). Through presenting the emotional nuance of acts of care between kin, this exhibition encourages readers to reflect on which lives society considers to be “grievable lives” in the context of the more-than-human (Butler, 2009). Through exposing the emotional weight of end-of-life care between human and non-human companions, the collection brings forward a form of relational intimacy that has traditionally been reserved for familial spheres. In so doing, Willow challenges conceptions of the family as an exclusively human unit, and brings forward creative and public expressions of grief by way of legitimising multispecies kinships as familial.
Through poetry and visual art, this work supports the imperative that forms of cross-species grief and care-giving should be taken seriously, and also that multispecies companionships be taken seriously as familial kinship structures.
Panel C: Queer Kinships (3.30-5.30pm, DP 501)
Irralie Doel (University of Brighton)
‘Actualising family through writing activist politics in the fiction of Larry Mitchell, Neil Bartlett and Joelle Taylor’
The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, written by Larry Mitchell and illustrated by Ned Asta, was first published in New York in 1977. It situates ‘the faggots and their friends’ socially, politically and spatially to establish multiple forms and facets of queer family through enacting, recording and mythologising queer activism.
In Neil Bartlett’s first novel, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990) characters walk the city, inhabit The Bar and invent home. Bartlett depicts, through verbal-visual dramatisation and the performance of gay intimacies, queer family forged in 1980s England during the AIDS crisis.
Joelle Taylor’s The Night Alphabet (2024) imagines, articulates and honours women’s kinship and creation of family in stories that oscillate across time and location to celebrate lesbian and butch histories and experiences of gendered resistance.
This paper maps confluences in these texts to show how the forging of family is essential for queer politics, experience, relationships, and activism. Through close textual analysis synthesised with theories of love and queer kinship, I show that writing fiction is a crucial process through which to imagine, communicate and actualise the possibilities of queer family.
Andy Irwin (University of Birmingham)
‘Alternative Kinship Arrangements in Three Contemporary Queer Novels’
Both queer scholarship and queer literary works have long interrogated the capacity of the traditional family to provide space for non-normative subjects (and, indeed, non-normative communities) to flourish. They have done so in methodologically- and epistemologically-diverse ways: Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004)—now exhaustively categorized as a polemic—advocates for a queer (non-)politics of negation which rejects heteronormative institutions such as the nuclear family and future-oriented political-ideological investments in the ‘Symbolic Child’; Jack Halberstam lingers over the potential of ‘imaginative life schedules’ in In a Queer Time and Place (2006); in both Queer Phenomenology (2006) and The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed considers the ways in which queer and racialised bodies might re-orientate themselves away from compulsory heterosexuality and the requirement to ‘continue the father’s line’; and in Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant demonstrates the ways in which many marginalised people continue to cling to the fantasy of ‘the good life’ and its attendant institutions—including the nuclear family and the social imperative to engage in interpersonal competition in neoliberal capitalist society.
In this paper, I explore the representation of alternative kinship arrangements in three recent works by gay writers: Bryan Washington’s Family Meal (2023), Justin Torres’s National Book Award-winning Blackouts (2023), and Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness (2025), and I bring these works into conversation with queer scholarship. In the world of each novel, the deep, non-familial bonds which form are accidental or circumstantial and develop in the wake of grief, psychic trauma, or family tension. In Washington’s and Vuong’s texts, non-familial bonds proliferate across homes and workplaces as their respective protagonists re-orientate themselves in their social worlds. In Torres’s novel, the author’s representation of an intergenerational queer friendship forged in a psychiatric facility orientates the reader away from toxic tropes associated with gay community relationships and cultural production (vulnerable youngster-predatory elder, daddy-son erotics, bitter old queens) and towards something much more optimistic—the possibility of transformative relationships in unexpected places. Taken individually and together, these works offer generative insights for scholars and activists committed to making alternative and non-traditional family and kinship forms visible and viable in still-late capitalism.
Vedrana Velickovic (University of Brighton)
‘Practice Paper on the Queer Intergenerational Reading Project’
When do young queer people get to meet and make friends with their elders? Where do older LGBTQ+ people go to meet and learn from younger queer folks? How do we bring queer generations together? This paper will report and reflect on running a queer intergenerational reading group at the Coast is Queer literary festival 2025.
Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell (University of Edinburgh)
‘‘Evil twin’ or ‘monstrous child’: the family melodramas of queer and trans studies’
Figures describing familial ties are prevalent in trans scholars’ discussions of the relationship between queer theory and transgender studies as (antagonistic) disciplinary fields. In 2004, Susan Stryker described transgender studies as queer theory’s ‘evil twin,’ whilst in her 1994 essay ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamonix,’ the field of queer studies is written as a maternal figure to trans theory as its monstrous child. Despite revisions of the exact nature and personality of this figure, notably Andrea Long Chu’s (2019) visceral depiction of trans studies as ‘the twin that queer studies ate in the womb,’ little has been done to interrogate why, in a field that has long problematised the role of the family and its fictions in upholding cisheteropatriarchy (Lewis 2023), metaphors of familial relations remain powerful conceptual images for its scholars.
Rather than litigate the truthfulness of trans studies’ claims regarding queer theory, this paper attends to the utility of family metaphors for its scholars, to what appeals to sibling or offspring relations reveal about trans studies’ self-conception and disciplinary history, and how these images limit the political imagination of the field. Returning to the decade in which Stryker first described transgender theory’s relation to its queer mother, this paper interrogates these familial metaphors through a reading of Hans Schierl’s 1998 film Dandy Dust, a sci-fi splatter DIY cinematic experiment which stages a trans protagonist in the midst of a reverse Oedipal melodrama. Combining psychoanalytic and Marxist readings of the family encouraged by Dandy Dust’s narrative, this paper argues that trans studies’ conceptualisation of itself through the figure of the child, either monstrous or twin, is a product of the field’s disciplinary history, and the metaphorical vehicle through which trans studies’ stages its own social reproduction fantasy around an idealised political subject who is innocent, plastic and racialised as white.
Panel D: Speech, Memory, Silence (3.30-5.30pm, DP 201)
Sara Gambella (University of Granada)
‘Fabulating the Family: Irene Solà’s Els dics as a Political Exercise of Collective Memory’
This paper aims at analysing Els dics (2018), a novel by Catalan author Irene Solà, as a literary exploration of the family as a mutable and contested space in the 21st century. The narrative follows Ada’s return to her rural hometown after three years in London, an event that triggers an intimate confrontation with family ties, unresolved affections, and the intergenerational transmission of stories and silences. Through Ada’s homecoming, Solà unfolds a polyphonic reconstruction of three generations, where familial memory can be read as a terrain of fabulation –a space where family is not simply recalled or inherited, but imaginatively and critically reworked as a contested social and political construct.
Building on this premise, I propose that Els dics challenges the heteropatriarchal fiction of the family by embracing multiplicity and fragmentation. The novel’s choral structure –where human, animal, and mythical voices intersect– gives rise to a collective temporality that exceeds the linearity of the canonical family narrative. At this intersection of memory and legend, of the documentary and the mythical, the novel recuperates elements of oral tradition, domestic archives, and Catalan folklore. From this perspective, I propose a reading of the work as an exercise in memory informed by Benjaminian theory, aimed at constructing a collective index of local and visual forms belonging to the realm of experience and of the “living speech” (2016: 55).
Furthermore, I address the use of Catalan as both a literary and political gesture. Beyond being the author’s family lexicon, the language functions as a vehicle for transforming personal experience into a collective narrative space. Here, Solà’s writing resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature (1975), in which language resists the dominance of majoritarian tongues and disrupts hegemonic models of kinship representation.
Finally, I examine the decentralization of the human gaze through an animal perspective. Rather than humanizing animals, Solà animalizes her characters, displacing the “I” toward alternative forms of subjectivity. This becoming-animal enacts what Deleuze and Guattari define as a “line of flight” (2004: 54–55), breaking away from anthropocentric models of the family and identity. In this respect, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of existing “in the open,” “in no place” (2002: 108) offers a valuable conceptual lens for understanding how the novel becomes a place to reimagine the kinship beyond human-centered structures, suggesting new modes of belonging that emerge from the margins
Natasha Kennedy (University of Brighton)
‘Todo tiembla, everything trembles: How heterolingual texts encourage a revaluation of the monolingual myth regarding familial closeness and intimacy in the “mother” tongue’
In Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism, Minnaard & Dembeck introduce the monolingual myth as “the idea that one’s expression is limited to a single language” (2014). According to them, the myth of monolingualism “stems from the ideology of nineteenth-century Romanticism, which adopted ‘nation’ as the principal criterion in the processes of language standardisation and consequent formation of literary canons” (Krstić, 2017). Later, the mid-XX century witnessed a boom in interest and studies into multilingual individuals. Many assumptions and misconceptions developed around multilingual subjects and cross-linguistic expression. Among these, is the idea that “individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, their “mother tongue,”” (Yildiz, 2012), that propagated at the same time the notion that an individual’s first language (L1) or mother tongue is one that allows familiarity, intimacy and so-called “emotional expression”. Though this may be true for many polyglots, the realities and complexities of multilingual identities can be more nuanced. Cases of abandonment of or estrangement from one’s “mother tongue” challenge the L1-focused notion of being “at home” in a language and highlight the need to critically and politically address these misconceptions.
This paper will analyse two texts: Peur Pietà (2024) by Chilian-Canadian poet Nicholas Dawson and Tolk (2024) by Korean adoptee Maja Lee Langvad who grew up in Denmark. Both texts deal with notions of the family, intimacy and questions of belonging. Dawson’s collection is explicitly heterolingual: multiple languages coexist within the text. It reveals both a closeness and intimacy with his sister, “Hermana”, but also highlights the difficult relationships he had with his “Madre” (mother) and his “Abuela” (grandmother). The inclusions of Spanish when talking about the women in his family portray the complex relationship Dawson has with the language he simultaneously wants to get closer to and distance himself from. Langvad’s most recent novel, Tolk, on the other hand, is an example of implicit heterolingualism, in which passages the reader understands to be reported dialogue in Korean are entirely redacted, and the author expresses her frustration and estrangement from the language of her biological parents, that she attempts to learn in order to communicate with them.
Through an analysis of how the concept of family and intimacy is dealt with in excerpts of both these texts, I will argue that heterolingual texts encourage us to rethink not only the myth of monolingualism, and how we tend to think about language(s) and literature(s), but also to challenge and contemporise fictions constructed around language, multilingual identities and the family.
Kate Phelan (Maynooth University)
‘Reading silence: The politics of the unsaid in Maeve Brennan’s domestic fiction’
Despite her family background as the daughter of two prominent anti-treaty Irish Republicans, Maeve Brennan is not widely considered a political writer. Yet, both the creation and survival of her now-acclaimed body of work and her life-long dedication to elucidating its central themes can be read as political acts from a feminist perspective. In deciding to spend her adult life in the United States, she ensured that she established a career and a legacy for her writing that would likely have proved impossible had she lived in Ireland in the mid-to-late twentieth century. This distance, often referred to as a form of ‘exile,’ also allowed her a wider perspective from which to comment on the social and political forces that shaped her native country. Generally assumed to be at least partly autobiographical, much of Brennan’s fiction is set within an imagined replica of the Dublin house where she spent her childhood, which coincided with the Irish War of Independence and the prolonged civil war that followed. While other scholars have noted the significance of this cultural context, the political aspects of Brennan’s writing remain relatively underexplored, partly due to the notable absence — but for one exception — of explicit mention of these wars or their effects.
In my proposed presentation, I intend to discuss how this absence itself has the potential to be re-interpreted as overtly political. The unsaid, loneliness in relationship, and familial alienation are all central themes in Brennan’s fiction, and I will explore how these concepts may be extrapolated out of the singular domestic space in which her work confines them, to be read a more general social commentary on this pivotal period in Ireland’s history. Maintaining the illusion of nuclear familial stability was an important element of co-creating a shared sense of national stability within the fragile new Free State. My presentation will argue that, in helping to shatter this illusion, Maeve Brennan’s fiction can be read as political in part because of what remains unsaid, rather than in spite of it
Joseph Ronan (University of Brighton)
‘Sharing a family failing: John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme’
The 9th series of radio sketch comedy John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme (2021) was a marked departure from the previous 8. Written during Covid-19 lockdowns in the UK, in which everyday rituals were abruptly re-experienced and re-contextualised, this series drew on familiar structural elements but radically refashioned them, contorting the format of the sketch show to accommodate a queer family saga spanning seven generations, and a moving examination of language, memory and cultural tradition. The non-linear arrangement of scenes across a period from 1899 to 2021 charts changing social attitudes to queerness in the UK, the scope and limits of intergenerational communication within established kinship structures, and the preservation and loss of queer cultural memory.
Drawing on the queer and asexual narrativities posed by Judith Roof and Elizabeth Hanna Hanson, Cynthia Gordon’s explorations of the constructive role of familects, Eve Sedgwick’s articulation of the avuncular function, and Jack Halberstam’s theories of queer failure and forgetting, this paper examines the quiet radicality of Finnemore’s approach to family and queer genealogies, which refuses teleology whilst pleasuring in the possibility and loss of origin.
Reading moments of misunderstanding, unknowability, and reiteration, particularly as they surround the figures of queer uncles and aunts, I suggest that Series 9 presents family (and especially the contemporary ‘inclusive’ family) as itself constituted by queer forgetting, and dramatizes a desire for the queer avunculate. At the same time, it brings into question the assumption of desire by positioning asexuality ambiguously as the site of both absence and origin, loss and succession, stasis and storytelling.
[1] Kalmykov, Вечное Солнце: Русская социальная утопия и научная фантастика [Eternal Sun: Russian Social Utopia and Scientific Fantasy], 339.
[2] Bogdanov, Красная Звезда: Роман-Утория [Red Star: A Utopian Novel], 1929, 139.
[3] Wood, “The Social History of Political Theory,” 351.
This workshop is part of the Horizon Europe funded project Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe (PNE). CAPONEU aims to assess the political novel as an important element of European political, social and cultural heritage and as a tool for community building and European advocacy. It sets out to examine how people in different national and cultural contexts engage with contemporary political issues and thereby have their share in shaping European societies and politics.
