Anarchic Intimacies: Queer Friendship and Erotic Bonds

Participants

The dissertation explores how key American artists and writers in the second half of the twentieth century have responded to the death of an intimate friend, and expressed their grief, both privately and in their art. The artists and writers who figure prominently in my study are Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz; Nan Goldin and Cookie Mueller; Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol; Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath; Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe; and Diane di Prima and Freddie Herko. Specifically, the project centers on how these figures have responded to bereavement in the context of their queer friendships. The analysis examines how, in each case, the artist who was left behind responded to that loss—and how those responses reflect, complicate, and/or contest then-prevailing ideas about death and mourning in American life. At the same time the study of the particularities of each of these relationships is the basis for the argument about the emotional and political potential of friendship as distinct from either romantic/sexual couplehood or kinship. Indeed, one aim of the project is to revalorize relationships that exceed the heteronormative model of sexual couplehood/platonic friendship/familial kinship, and to argue for the political and affective possibilities of such friendships.