# Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance - Hardcover

by **Francesca T. Royster** (Author)

**A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago's North and South Sides**

As a multiracial household in Chicago's North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson's _The Argonauts_, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. _Choosing Family_ chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago's South Side--itself a dynamic character in the memoir--where "family" was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.

Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a "queer" attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, _Choosing Family_, ultimately, is about joy--about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

### Author Biography

**Francesca T. Royster** is a native of Chicago's South Side and a professor of English literature at DePaul University in Chicago, where she teaches classes on African American literature and culture, Shakespeare, and gender and queer theory. She is the author of two academic books, _Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon_ and _Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era_. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her essays have appeared in the _Los Angeles Review of Books_, _Chicago Literati_, and _Feminist Studies_, among others. She lives in Chicago.  

**Number of Pages:** 288

**Dimensions:** 1.2 x 9.3 x 6.4 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** February 07, 2023

## Details

- **Price:** 26.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 26.00 USD | In stock |

## Images

- Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance - Hardcover

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