Out and Out from the Family to the Community

Heritage Resources Distinguished Speakers: Dr. Kristen Mahoney: “Out and Out from the Family to the Community: The Housmans and the Politics of Queer Sibling Devotion.” In this talk, Kristin Mahoney will discuss the manner in which Laurence Housman’s collaborative relationship with his sister, with whom he lived for his entire life, became the foundation for broader forms of feminist and anticolonial political thinking, and she will address the ways in which Laurence’s advocacy for sex reform informed his posthumous framing of his brother’s sexuality. For the Housman family, queer kinship practices engendered political activism, and political activism fostered queer kinship practices.

Kristin Mahoney is an Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University. Her research and teaching interests include aestheticism, Decadence and queer studies. She has published articles in Victorian Studies, Criticism, Victorian Review, Victorian Periodicals Review, English Literature in Transition, Nineteenth-Century Prose and Literature Compass. Her book Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. She is currently working on a project entitled “Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Aestheticism and the Family.”