72nd ANNUAL MEETING

MÜNSTER UNIVERSITY

May 28-30, 2026

“KINSHIP IN AMERICAN STUDIES”

Call for Papers

The University of Münster cordially invites you,
 on the occasion of the 72nd Annual Meeting of the GAAS,
to the international conference

Kinship in American Studies

May 28-30, 2026

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Katharina Gerund  |   Shannon Gibney   |    Mark Rifkin

When thinking about kinship in the context of American studies, many phenomena and topics come to mind: the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, the forceful separation of families of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the AIDS quilt, the 1950s housewife, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, 27 rue de Fleurus, bachelor societies and paper sons, the boarding school system, the cult of domesticity, republican motherhood, Sally Hemings, Benjamin’s Franklin’s address “Dear Son,” partus sequitur ventrem, etc. This eclectic but by no means exhaustive list can be understood as an urgent call for more differentiated definitions of what kinship actually means in the specific contexts evoked above. As Judith Butler has argued, “Kinship loses its specificity as an object once it becomes characterized loosely as modes of enduring relationship” (“Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” 37). Butler’s argument conjures some of the central questions in critical kinship studies today: What is kinship? How different is it from other expressions of the familial and the social? How central are interhuman relationships to definitions of kinship? How resonant are even counterhegemonic practices of kinship with the logics of heteropatriarchal structures and economies?  

In American studies, kinship has been defined both as an emancipatory practice of minoritized subjects and communities and a site of biopolitical power of the state, the empire, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. Foundational writers of kinship theory (e.g. Rubin, Rich, Sedgwick, Spillers, Lorde, Anzaldúa, Butler, and Weston, among others) problematize kinship not only by conceptualizing kinship practices outside of white, heteronormative family settings, but by critically interrogating the ambivalence around kinship as a critical idiom which encompasses the promises and violences that kinship has engendered historically, epistemologically, and ontologically. Building on this earlier feminist, queer, and critical race theorist work in American studies, more recent scholarship (e.g. by Eng, Rifkin, Fielder, Freeman, Bentley, Malatino, Haraway, Lowe, Hartman, and Whyte, among others) explores the desires, grammars, and potentialities inherent in kinship idioms as well as their political and aesthetic dimensions. As Teagan Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman astutely observe, “the idioms of kinship are not simply riven with ideological ruses waiting to be exposed; they are also invested and bound up with desire, fantasy, and affect” (Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form 3).

Taking cue from these critical and reparative approaches alike, this conference invites panels which bring together American studies and critical kinship studies with a particular focus on the forms, politics, receptions, historicities, and representations of kinship. We invite 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 from 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.

Submissions from scholars of all career stages are welcome! For questions regarding accessibility, please contact the conference organizing team directly.

Possible areas of interest may include the following:

  • Kinship and nation-building and empire-building through the centuries and in various local, regional, transnational, diasporic and global contexts; 
  • Kinship and biopolitics: law, property, possession / dispossession;
  • Kinship and the environmental humanities: more-than-human and interspecies relations and cosmologies, kinship as mutual responsibility; 
  • Kinship and (bio)technologies;
  • Critical motherhood/ fatherhood/ sibling / childhood studies;
  • Communicating kinship: the role of new technology and social media for creating,
  • maintaining, shaping, and/or breaking off kinship relations;
  • Kinship and temporalities: (re)negotiations of cultural knowledge, narratives, and intergenerational memory, utopian / dystopian notions of kinship; 
  • Queer kinship: alternative practices of belonging, anti-heteropatriarchal practices, i.e., the vocabulary of (queer) resistance and counter-hegemonic potentialities;
  • Kinship and affects: as sentimental political discourse, public feelings, etc.;
  • Kinship as political affiliations and affinities, as structures of solidarity and survival, as mutual responsibility
  • Kinship and care: care economies, kinship under economic precarities, “Peter Pan millennials,” etc.
  • White privilege: reproducing Whiteness and reinforcing power through family and kinship;
  • Kinship and political upheaval: forced migration, families in transit, negotiating citizenship through kinship;
  • Kinship as a site of (physical, psychological, emotional and epistemological) violence and abuse;
  • Kinship and pedagogy.

We welcome workshop proposals of up to 4 papers (20 minutes each).

Proposals for two-hour panels need to include the name of one confirmed speaker. Panels should allow for up to three more speakers to apply after the proposal has been accepted by the GAAS Advisory Board. If the panel takes the form of a roundtable discussion, more speakers can be invited. Only one of the panel organizers can simultaneously be a presenter on the panel. Organizers and speakers must not serve in more than one panel during the conference. We encourage panel proposals by organizers from different home institutions.

Panels can only be organized by members of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA). Speakers also have to be members of the DGfA by the time of the conference. This rule does not apply to members of the EAAS and ASA.

This year’s conference will be hosted as an on-site event at the University of Münster. The American Studies Münster Team looks forward to welcoming you.

Please send all panel proposals to executive_director@dgfa.de. The deadline is September 30, 2025.