Introduction

We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.

Family, home, love, and loss are recurring themes within the narratives that entangle people’s lives. They appear across myriad cultural contexts, from the innocuous and light-hearted to the life-changing and grave. Whether it is the plotline that drives movies and television programs, turning points that shift prolonged interpersonal conflict, or cornerstone issues that motivate proposed legislation, what it means to live stories of family/home/love/loss matters. ¹ In turn, certain stories and storytellers tend to matter more than others. Normatively defined and presumably static or fixed positions on ways of relating and identities—“suitable” families, “fit” homes, “real” ways of loving, and “healthy” experiences of loss—shape and govern what it (supposedly) should look like and mean to perform within these stories. While most cultural realities “need and merit being narrated,” limiting thinking about what and who constitutes family/home/love/loss continues to privilege those people and experiences that are believed to be “normal,” and to dismiss or exclude those that people may not understand. Still, today, counter-normative stories persevere and await telling and fuller inclusion.

The following special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies is comprised of stories that queer family/home/love/loss. Although each essay addresses diverse topics, methodologies, and approaches, they all relate in at least three ways: (a) All essays are written by scholars whose academic homes are in communication and/or performance studies and who value critical and interpretive approaches to research. Thus, often of particular interest are the ways in which meaning is co-constituted, or jointly comes into being, within relating and performance, and how those interactions and meanings shape how people understand each other, relationships, culture, communities, etc. (b) All essays investigate one or more of the areas of family/home/love/loss. (c) Each essay interrogates family/home/love/loss as queer phenomena and/or works to queer those phenomena.

Queer Theory is a complex and radical theoretical tradition that emerged out of gay activist groups, such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) and feminist studies in the early 1990s. At the very least, the tradition seeks to confront and rupture categorical and normalizing thinking concerning sex, gender, and sexuality (Beasley, 2005). It assumes that heteronormativity and heterosexism act as governing and often injurious forces in cultural lives (Yep, 2003) by perpetuating and legitimizing essentialized identities and performances. Queer Theory resists simple definition and categorization (Jagose, 1996), and is a paradigm that has evolved over the past two decades to include the study of other dimensions of identity, including race, ethnicity, class, and ability status (Ahmed, 2006, Berry, 2013; Jagose, 1996; Johnson, 2001; Warner, 2012), as well as relationships (Elia, 2003) and research methods (Holman Jones & Adams, 2010) as queer or queer-able.

Ahmed writes (2006), “To make things queer is to disturb the order of things” (p. 161), and Halperin (1997) explains, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (p. 62). Thus, to queer is to disrupt taken-for-granted and “common sense” presumptions about cultural lives and beings. Moreover, queering entails (re)considering selves as being more situated, fluid, and complicated than fixed, static, and uniform. In this sense, the disruption of a queer orientation helps to create the conditions that make possible and necessary different, more inclusive understandings of identities and ways of relating.

Contributors to this special issue work to embody and evoke the spirit of disruption and openness that is often associated with queer. They call on key queer voices to assist in their sense-making, such as Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, David Halperin, E. Patrick Johnson, Tim Miller, Jose Muñoz, Eve Sedgwick, Gust Yep, and Michael Warner. The pieces display creative and experimental methodologies and approaches, including autoethnography, adapted performance, collage, personal narrative, performative writing, poetry, split text, and staged playwriting. Authors work to provide novel and reflexive pathways on which to trouble issues of family/home/love/loss, and in ways that I suspect will readily draw readers into the stories and issues being conveyed. Brave storytelling takes the lead and prescriptive, formulaic analysis is suspended.

There is an impressive power in narratives to entangle and untangle relational lives. The accounts that comprise this issue ask us to look more closely at, and to think more critically and imaginatively about, stories that are grounded in essentialized and categorical thinking. Amy K. Kilgard plays with “queer failure” by disrupting and disorienting normative performances of CRACKED family narratives. ² Stacy Holman Jones’s and Tony Adams’s queer fugue troubles grief, loss, and remembering, in particular, how the “dance of relationality” renders cultural performers undone by death and language. Craig Gingrich-Philbrook revisits a past performance to interrogate political and personal events that complexly fostered suicidal ideation against the backdrop of religious homophobia. Jay Brower’s essay thematizes disorientation within queer theoretical space to challenge established, linear, and oppressive cultural systems of mourning as expressed in personal reflections on the loss of colleague and friend John T. Warren. ³ E. Patrick Johnson’s essay explores the notion of homosexuality as pathology and inherited “disease” in parts of the Black church, and pays tribute to and traces the legacy of overlapping sexual and racial struggles of his queer ancestors. Julie Wight queers “home” through an interrogation of the It Gets Better Project, the digital movement that seeks to create a safe place for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) youth, yet as Wight contends, fails to do so equitably for transgendered youth. Sandra L. Faulkner troubles “mommy myths,” including institutionalized positions on relational attachment, to more closely consider what it means to perform as a “mother” who might like and love her child, but objects to normative motherhood. Mercilee M. Jenkins queers home/family/love/loss as experienced by a group of hippies who in 1973 communed and endured personal and political crises. Julie Cosenza’s account explores the intersections of queerness and disability, seeking to expand possibilities for understanding time, inheritance, (re)production, family interactions, and privilege. Finally, Blake A. Paxton advocates for “re-membering rituals” and more complex and creative ways of engaging bereavement through a conversation he performs with his deceased mother.

This special issue is offered in the spirit of a queer intervention that advocates more conscientious and imaginative stories of family/home/love/loss, the identities that are complexly co-constituted within these spaces, and a greater multiplicity of ways for critically (re)presenting cultural inquiry on these issues. As such, the collection finds an ideal home in Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, a leader in publishing ground-breaking and exciting scholarship for diverse storytellers. I hope the essays inspire what good critical work can: open discussion, mindful inquiry, in-depth and honest understanding on issues that remain under-examined or altogether neglected, healing, transformation, and meaningful ways to use the insights that are actualized through narrative to make relational lives more inclusive and equitable.