Abstract

This article closely reads “Chelsea Girls,” an autobiographical short story by Eileen Myles that depicts her experience caring for the diabetic, bipolar poet James Schuyler when she was a young writer getting started in East Village in the late 1970s. Their dependency relationship is a form of queer kinship, an early version of the caring relations between lesbians and gay men that HIV/aids would demand over the next two decades as chosen families emerged to nurture gay men and lesbians rejected by their families of origin. The representation of queer kinship offers an alternative to more traditional portrayals of care in literature that focus on the heteronormative family, a site of care that feminist dependency theory also paradoxically privileges. This article synthesizes insights from queer theory and critical disability studies in order to expand our understanding of the roles participants in care can play, the ways they can feel, and the outcomes they can achieve. Myles and Schuyler’s dependency relationship was sustaining for both of them and also critical for her development as a pioneering lesbian poet in an art world still dominated by men.