The Ontology of the Couple

Can one be queer and coupled? Or is the duality that defines the couple form fundamentally at odds with queer existence?

In 1998, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner wrote that “making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property and to the nation.” Since then, however, the couple form has become the major vehicle through which gays and lesbians have achieved access to cultural and legal institutions, as well as broader social acceptance.

“The Ontology of the Couple,” the latest issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, edited by S. Pearl Brilmyer, Filippo Trentin, and Zairong Xiang, sits on the premise that before one can be for or against the couple form, it is necessary to understand what the couple is. Contributors ask what it means to be in two—that is, to have one’s experience bound up for some duration with another.

Visit the issue’s table of contents to read the introduction and the first article, freely available through the end of August, and to browse articles by Bobby Benedicto, Lee Edelman, Annamarie Jagose, Heather Love, Joseph Litvak, and more.