Acting like family : performing kinship in the literature of the American Civil War and early Reconstruction

“Acting Like Family: Performing Kinship in the Literature of the American Civil War and Early Reconstruction,” argues that performance – both in the sense of performing a cultural product to an audience and in the sense of enacting an action or a specific set of behaviours – is central to understanding the way in which mid-nineteenth-century writers imagined kinship beyond what is traditionally understood as the heteronormative family. I argue that kinship operates as a social performance – through the repeated enactment of a repertoire of caretaking behaviours – and that performance – consisting of bodily movement or song – stores the embodied memory of kinship. Focusing on the late 1850s, the Civil War, and early Reconstruction, I read a range of writers – Harriet Beecher Stowe, Augusta Jane Evans, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Louisa May Alcott, Frances E. W. Harper, Julia C. Collins – and a range of genres to demonstrate that these writers envisioned or recorded performances of kinship, ones that did not seek to mimic the culturally dominant white heteronormative family, to reflect on the upheavals of their contemporary moment and imagine possible national and racial futures in their wake. Drawing on queer theory, I also explore the ways in which these performances of kinship reorient bodies through time in ways that challenge or disrupt genealogical and national timelines.