Friendship as Shared Enmity

• In Event: Ethics and Eros: Theoretical Considerations of LGBTQ Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Objective/Perspective
In this paper we seek to use friendship, as conceptualized in particular, by Roach (2011) as a politics of “shared estrangement” to get to an argument about liking.
That is we move from friendship, as that to which homosexuality (and perhaps other versions of affection, affectation, and being) tends, toward an engagement with the concept of loving, which we then discard (to the extent such a thing is possible) in favor of an ethos of liking. In the process, we use liking to argue for an ethic of shared enmity. In other words, we think that if Roach is making an argument for a politics of friendship, we are arguing for an ethic that is more shared than estranged, and held together by the concept of enmity which is a mutual opposition: a holding together of poles by magnetic centripetal forces.

Methods/ Data Source:
We use, then, the relationship (the friendship, estranged and particularly enmitous) between Finny and Gene in the novel A Separate Peace to suggest that a focus on the sharing of enmity in relationship, when read as a liking that holds loving at bay, might well be a model for thinking about the value and use of friendship, going forward in queer studies in education.

Conclusions/Significance: Ultimately we hope the presentation will elucidate our engagement here not as a move to make an argument for a progression (from loving to liking; from estrangement to enmity) but rather as a shift in relations that is worth exploring, perhaps first in literary and especially young adult ‘texts’ and then through other, varied and messier versions of reality that aren’t quite so sewn up in history as curricular objects, bound between color copy.

Authors

• Kevin Burke, University of Georgia - Athens

• Adam Joseph Greteman, School of the Art Institute of Chicago