Sam McBean: Death, Care, and Queer Kinship

Abstract

This talk explores what it means to form kinship at the end of life - to build connection based not on the promise of futurity, but through endings. 

Drawing from personal experience as both griever and death doula, Sam McBean considers how proximity to death might produce a queer kind of kinship: one structured by care, vulnerability, and temporal limits rather than endurance or reproduction.  Engaging with queer and feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Elizabeth Freeman, and Eve Sedgwick, McBean asks how relationships forged in the space of dying - where there is no “long term” - challenge dominant understandings of kinship, temporality, and value. 

Through narrative and reflection, the talk moves between hospice rooms, literary texts, and theoretical frameworks to trace how queer attachments to endings reveal alternative modes of intimacy, attention, and care.

Speaker

Sam McBean is Reader in Gender, Sexuality, and Contemporary Culture at Queen Mary University of London and co-chair of the Sexual Cultures Research Group. She is the author of Feminism’s Queer Temporalities (Routledge, 2016) and has published on feminist theory, queer theory, and contemporary literature and visual culture in journals including Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Contemporary Literature, and Feminist Media Studies. She is also a death doula and is currently working on an autoethnographic project, ‘Queer Death’, which explores end-of-life care, death, and loss from a queer perspective.

Banner image: Liana S, Unsplash

Inline image: Sophie Chamas