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Desire, love, and rejection are poignantly explored through same-sex and heterosexual dynamics in this story through the narrator’s reflections on his childhood. His contemplations of the deaths he encountered as a child add a level of spiritual meditation. Like Spinoza’s free man, the narrator aspires to think about life, but is stuck with memories of deaths of friends and family members: suicides by hanging, shooting, drowning, a stillborn child, a child who dies from illness. For the narrator, life is more frightening than death. Holding onto the Christian beliefs that his grandparents turned to amid the chaos of China’s twentieth century, the narrator counts himself among those who admire death as an aspect of God’s sublime wisdom. By sharing his memories of death and desire under a regime where these topics are not always speakable, he hopes to move a little closer to freedom.

Can one be queer and coupled? Or is the logic of complementarity that subtends the couple 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, we have witnessed the couple form move from the periphery to the center of queer politics, becoming the major vehicle through which gays and lesbians have achieved access to cultural and legal institutions as well as broader social acceptance. While before the late twentieth century same-sex relations circulated largely outside what Foucault called the ‘monogamic and conjugal cell’, today it seems even the most peripheral of sexualities have been absorbed under the couple’s ever-expanding jurisdiction. Does the present moment require a more honest reckoning with the central role of the couple in queer politics and everyday life? Or do we need, now more than ever, to revitalize our commitment to the production of a sexual politics that would resist the ideology of the couple? This two-day symposium brings together some of the most significant voices in Anglo-American queer theory today to address the historical, cultural, and metaphysical force of the couple — and its often unquestioned status in queer life. THURSDAY – 9 JUNE 2016 10:30 Morning coffee 11:00 Introductions 11:15–13:00 Heather Love and Eng-Beng Lim on Commitment 13:00–14:30 Lunch 14:30–16:15 Elizabeth Freeman and Bobby Benedicto on Reproduction 16:30–18:15 Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman and Peter Coviello on Devotion 18:15 Coffee break 19:00–21:15 Lee Edelman and Joseph Litvak on Estrangement preceded by an Intermezzo by the organizers 21:15 Reception sponsored by GLQ FRIDAY – 10 JUNE 2016 13:30 Welcome coffee 14:00–15:45 Michael Cobb and Petrus Liu on Openness 16:00–17:45 C. Riley Snorton and Rinaldo Walco on Arrang, The Ontology of the Couple, symposium, ICI Berlin, 9–10 June 2016