Date of Award

Spring 3-30-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

English

First Advisor

Alyssa Quinn

Abstract

A Mercurial Queer Genealogy consists of 13 essays exploring gender, sexuality, and relationships. These essays are mercurial in their formal play; some tend towards prose poetry or visual poetry, others sit closer to a segmented essay, an enumeration, or an essay in fragments. All fall perhaps inside the umbrella of lyric essays. The words themselves become mercurial as well: the thesis luxuriates in the pleasures of language, transforming words into objects of inquiry and wonder. The limitations of language also frustrate, especially when trying to describe queer identities which refuse to conform to linguistic categories. Hence, queer connotes both subject matter—gender and sexuality—and the methods for approach: slippery, colorful, blooming, with evidence coming from the body. Much of the work is engaged with an impulse to trace things back, to locate oneself in a genealogy as a method of understanding present experience. This manifests in a citational exuberance: building and participating in an archive of queerness, creating a citational chain of epigraphs and footnotes, a daisy chain of becoming, a passing-on of possibility.

Rights Statement

All rights reserved. This copy is provided to the Kenyon Community solely for individual academic use. For any other use, please contact the copyright holder for permission.

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