Feb
18
12:30am
Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance-- Francesca Royster in conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs
By Charis Books and More/Charis Circle
Charis welcomes Francesca Royster in conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs for a discussion of Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance. A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South Sides.
As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.
Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.
Francesca T. Royster is a native of Chicago’s South Side and a professor of English literature at DePaul University in Chicago, where she teaches classes on African American literature and culture, Shakespeare, and gender and queer theory. She is the author of three academic books, Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era, and Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Literati, and Feminist Studies, among others. She lives in Chicago.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the co-author of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M Archive: After the End of the World, Dub: Finding Ceremony, andUndrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.
This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage
Please contact us at [email protected] or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected]. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we begin this new way of connecting across distances.
By attending our virtual event you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to [email protected] immediately.
hosted by
Charis Books and More/Charis Circle
share