Renarratable Bonds: Queer Relationality in the Scene of Redress

This essay recovers Judith Butler’s theory of self-narration for queer theory and narratology. The essay shows how self-narration unlocks relational capacities not entirely stifled by disciplinary power. The essay spotlights the importance of renarratability, or the capacity for an event to be renarrated, to Butler’s theory. Renarration engenders recursive inconsistencies rife with queer potential. Through renarration, one can compose a scene of redress that revises the violent and otherwise life-denying contours of narratability itself. As an example, the essay turns to Danez Smith’s essay, “How HIV Ruined My Sex Life. Then I Met My Match” (2021), published at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Smith renarrates a scene of redress that transformed their affective and social relations to sex as a Black, queer, nonbinary person with HIV. Through self-narration, Smith revises the nar-ratability of Black queer bonds and demonstrates how self-narration can sustain and strengthen the capacities of queer relationality.