ABSTRACT
In an extended engagement with Renee Gladman’s multi-genre experimental writing and accompanying ink drawings in Calamities (2016) and Prose Architectures (2017), this chapter explores the relationship between the legacy of modernist aesthetics and contemporary theories of queer kinship. In this light, queer relationality is not only a material, social reality but a formal question. Can abstractionist aesthetics be a protest against racist and homophobic regimes of representation rather than a turn away from political critique and social engagement? Reading Gladman’s work as an example of “sensuous abstraction” that illuminates the formal principles at work in the arrangement of kinship into various social shapes, this chapter develops a theory of Black queer kinaesthetics.
