Changing the story: queer worlding kinship in picturebooks

Looking around at the world of late capitalism with its precarious existences for so many humans and nonhumans, one might conclude that the stories we are worlding with, at least in the mainstream, do not make sense. This thesis is built around the premise that stories enable and constrain the questions we can ask, and thus enable and constrain the worlds we can imagine, and so shape our collective becoming. Cultivating the capacity to seek out and listen for alternate stories that enable us to "look differently" (Tsing) at the world is the ethical work of queer worlding (Haraway), a readerly act of generative defamiliarization that I apply to children's literature. In this manuscript-based thesis, in conversation with the interdisciplinary fields of queer ecologies and feminist science and technology studies (STS), and learning from Indigenous theorists and storytellers, I look to picturebooks as speculative companions for imagining otherwise. I suggest that picturebooks—brimming with cross-species, multi-kind, more-than-human collaborations and odd kin encounters—can admit our imaginations to realities and relationalities that might otherwise pass us by. Taking up contemporary picturebooks including Emily Gravett's The Odd Egg, Jillian Tamaki's They Say Blue, and Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade's We Are Water Protectors, I find these texts provide generative opportunities for interrogating anthropocentric, extractive, and exceptionalist mythologies that restrict our capacities for responsive and decolonial imaginings of what is and what could be, by inviting the reader to think about kinship in expansive and inclusive ways. While children's literature is often examined for its conservative tendencies, I hold up these imagetexts as complex and oft overlooked sites for re-animating "nature" and coming to know humans as interconnected, relational beings who already make home and kin in queer excess of biogenetic, nuclear, monogamous, reproductive schemas of family and belonging. In this way, changing the story means staying with the precarious trouble of the worlds we already inhabit, inherit, and create, cultivating a care-full and curious attention to the storytellers and stories that are always already here making other worlds possible, and taking up response-able and situated practices for restorying our worlds toward more inclusive, sustainable and ethical realities for all.