queer – Kristen Roedel

On Becoming “Homeless”

Photograph of a dark window, which overlooks a very green and very rainy lawn. Between the two windows, a tall tree is obscured.

Last night, I said goodbye to my childhood home forever. Ever since I began teaching diasporic world literatures, I’ve been toying with the concept of “home.” I asked my students–a diverse bunch from all around the world–how they would define home. In attempts to get them to think more deeply, I told them how IContinue reading “On Becoming “Homeless””

Un-Becoming a People Pleaser

Photograph of a woman standing in the middle of an overgrown, dried out field. She holds a black umbrella over her head, wears a black rimmed hat, a black trench coat, and black boots. She holds a black briefcase. The sky is dark and gloomy.

I’ve lived nearly 32 years in service to others. Taught to “do the right thing,” to “be the bigger person,” to do what everyone else had done before me, and to “wait my turn” to live the way I wanted to, you can’t even begin imagine how angry I was–am–when I realized that my innate desire to help others and my chronic aversion to conflict had not only been used for others’ sole benefit but in order to keep me “in my place.”

On Becoming Political

The disorder peculiar to my country (the United States) is its citizens’ inability to care about anything but themselves. I blame this on the Christian principles of “aspir[ing] to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs […] so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one” (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12).Continue reading “On Becoming Political”

On Becoming a Bride, or Everything NOT to Ask Queer Couples Getting Married

The identities of the individuals discussed have been disguised in order to protect their businesses. My then wife-to-be and I were sitting in side-by-side styling chairs at the salon for our trial hair and makeup session for our wedding day. The makeup artist had just introduced herself, and although I had told the salon overContinue reading “On Becoming a Bride, or Everything NOT to Ask Queer Couples Getting Married”

On Becoming the Only Queer in the Family

“It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew.” — Nella Larsen, Passing

On Becoming Me (An Intro)

“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 52 I already know I’ll regret setting all down in writing, attached toContinue reading “On Becoming Me (An Intro)”

“Dressing Yourself” as Method: Meditations on Queer Daughterhood

This essay was originally composed in May 2019 for Professor Lisa Diedrich’s Feminist Interdisciplinary Histories and Methods course at Stony Brook University. The essay appears in its original form. “Definitely, too,” Nella Larsen writes in her 1928 novella Quicksand, “it conveyed to Helga her exact status in her new environment. A decoration. A curio. AContinue reading ““Dressing Yourself” as Method: Meditations on Queer Daughterhood”

Death Rattle

A photo of a cemetery. In the foreground are three headstones reading "Howell" and two reading "De Beauchamp." Two tall trees stand in the background, blocking the light of a setting sun.

Mortician Neil Aldridge is used to grief, but he struggles to comfort his wife, Anna, who’s reeling from multiple miscarriages. Teaching elementary school art has paid for their Long Island home and fertility treatments, but it has transformed what Anna once loved (children and art) into a mockery of her existence. When their dreams ofContinue reading “Death Rattle”