Following my last post, I decided to take direction from another of the writing exercises I’ve given students in the past in order to help me organize my next chapter in my dissertation. This exercise goes back to the early cut-and-paste methods of organizing an essay from grade school.

Finding that I had over sixty pages of notes already collected for this chapter on the reproductive futurism, queer modes of family making and the antisocial turn in queer theory, I printed these notes out, cut them up and then began laying them out as if they were a puzzle.

Through this method, patterns emerged, and I saw that the original way I’d thought of organizing this chapter wasn’t necessarily suited for where many of my observations were leading. Making adjustments, I ended up sectioning off these notes into five different parts. Like the drawing exercise before, this method helped me to visualize my paper in new ways.

From the five sections I organized these notes into, I’ll be posting five separate blog posts over the next two weeks, approaching the drafting process for this chapter in smaller, bite-sized chunks. The blogs will be laid out as follows:

  1. Born of Man and Could It Be Magic?: a summary of my central texts in this chapter, two books published by gay male authors through queer presses, dealing with gay men becoming impregnated and giving birth to biological children.
  2. The Antisocial Thesis: how the texts above shed light on this turn in queer theory and the necessary background to understand this phenomenon.
  3. Privilege & Power: sifting through networked hierarchies of gender, economic status, and race as they pertain to the texts and gay men’s families.
  4. The Gayby Boom & the AIDS Epidemic: overlapping metaphors between reproductive futurity and queer futurity at large.
  5. Could It Be Queer? After plodding through debates on assimilation, heteronormativity and homonationalism, what can we make of these new stories of new families?