There is a thin line between autofiction and autotheory, just as there is between biography—or memoir—and autofiction. But a tentative definition is that autofiction is writing in which the author is a character in some form and autotheory is writing that is self-consciously situated between the self (however that is defined) and theory (in whatever way that term is understood). This short essay explores these two forms of writing, especially as they relate to what I call the ‘fiction (...) of the self’. As with the previous essay, different examples are brought in to build a theoretical argument. The seven thematic sections of this essay are as follows: (1) Autowriting and the Self. Here, I introduce these new genres of autowriting (especially in relation to McKenzie Wark’s and Laurent Fournier’s definitions). (2) Marked Bodies and Situated Theory. In which I survey some of the field and attend to the marginal history of some of this writing. (3) Genre and Desire. In which I look to how the self is brought into writing or how the self is already written. (4) Cut-Ups and Fold-Ins. In which I explore some more experimental methods of autowriting. (5) Afterlives, Autoethnographies and Nervous Systems. Where I briefly consider an auto style of writing more generally. (6) Fictioning the Self. In which I make the claim I mentioned above about autofiction staging the fiction of the self in different ways. (7) Mirrors and Prisms. In which I explore autowriting as a kind of optical device. The essay ends with a brief coda in which I write about my own experience teaching an MA seminar on autofiction and autotheory. (shrink)

Abstract:The hypochondriac feels ill, is reminded they are always ill, and is always told they are never ill because they’re a hypochondriac. They get better, only to read their symptoms as illness again, in a health-illness dialectic that undermines the medical, clinical, or social cure. The social figure of hypochondria embodies the relation between the health-illness of the psyche and the health-illness of the world, as a figure of critique and a coming of age with it. By its very structure, (...) hypochondria is a critical incision in the health-illness and mind-body divides, and it is also a metaphor for a broader modern illness. This essay investigates histories of hypochondriacal symptoms and hypochondria as a historical symptom of the modern condition, that birthed it. Additionally, I include autotheoretical fragments—a historically recurring and amenable form to hypochondria—to better theorize hypochondria’s immanent critique of clinical and medical (un)certainty. Foregrounding the contradiction of a body trying to protect and a body trying to kill, a body lived as an outside threat and a body lived as an inside to protect, the hypochondriac becomes a dialectical diagnostician of what it may mean to seek health in sickness if health is not cure but recurring symptom, struggle, and overcoming. (shrink)

Despite its imperative to include all gendered positions under one umbrella, ‘trans’ is continually riven by intramural confrontation over the differences between its masculine and feminine iterations. Whether in political organizing, on social media or in the pages of academic trans theory, it sometimes seems like ‘trans’ is subject to an interminable and gendered custody battle. Dissatisfied with the terms of masc–femme antagonism, this essay uses the gendered interfaces of critique and autotheory to enmesh the work of Jules Gill-Peterson (...) and Paul B. Preciado. Reading into the interdependence of Gill-Peterson’s and Preciado’s texts yields a different theory: trans as an auto-antonym, a word that produces opposite meanings depending on context. Treating trans as auto-antonymic conjures a relational and even erotic escape from the naturalization of gendered antagonism in trans theory, affirming the unexpected bridges, reversals or ‘sex changes’ of specifically trans writing. (shrink)

This work of autotheory explores whether meditation may offer a methodologically germane mode of responsiveness to Donna Haraway’s compostist challenge, in which “think we must!” In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Haraway urges their readers to approach futurity as materially sympoietic, that is, partnered, trans-connected with oddkin inter-species intersubjectivities, Homo sapiens as composted sapience rather than beleaguering posthuman social mass. Set on the steeply sloping seven acres my wife and I have taken to calling (...) “Yes Mountain” (Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea), this paper foregrounds mindful humility as one means of opting out of anthropogenic slow violence; our pacifism seeks to actively relinquish tools, weapons, and words. But Yes Mountain currently faces a direly urgent problem: the rapacious and elongated summers now produce conditions that are highly favorable to vector species carrying parasites that cause Pine Wilt Disease; in five years, more than two million Pinus denisflora and Pinus koraiensis have been killed on the Korean peninsula. Haraway speaks of “cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the ‘game over, too late’ discourse” interrupting any act of sympoiesis, but rather than any of these, it is insufficient knowledge by which my wife and I are paralyzed. How to find a way out of our morally perplexed passivity? Our farming neighbors endlessly praise the efficacy of Abamectin, a biopesticide. This paper seeks to explore not only what to think, but also how … how to homage, care for, respect, defend, salvage, preserve the elder arboreal presences on Yes Mountain, in ways that neither barbarically nor re-traumatizingly disregard and overlook the rhizomatic, unseen, microbial undergrounds? (shrink)

This discussion concerns the under-explored influence of Jacques Derrida on Paul B. Preciado and the autotheoretical enterprise that is Testo Junkie. Picking up on the deconstructive logic of contamination at work in Preciado’s early writings, the article reckons with autotheory as both a theoretical mode motored by the first person and an autobiographical mode interested in self-shaping. In so doing, it offers a genealogy of autotheory that finds its origins in Derrida’s disinterest in disciplinary purity and dislike of (...) philosophical detachment, at the same time as positioning Testo Junkie firmly within a French literary and philosophical context where it both intervenes in the activity of queer theorizing and antagonizes the highly popular genre of autofiction through a series of generic contaminations. Autotheory, in this itinerary, is inseparable from the self-writing project that Preciado undertakes and advocates, one that disidentifies from the fiction of a privately sexed and interior ‘self’. (shrink)

This discussion concerns the under-explored influence of Jacques Derrida on Paul B. Preciado and the autotheoretical enterprise that is Testo Junkie. Picking up on the deconstructive logic of contamination at work in Preciado’s early writings, the article reckons with autotheory as both a theoretical mode motored by the first person and an autobiographical mode interested in self-shaping. In so doing, it offers a genealogy of autotheory that finds its origins in Derrida’s disinterest in disciplinary purity and dislike of (...) philosophical detachment, at the same time as positioning Testo Junkie firmly within a French literary and philosophical context where it both intervenes in the activity of queer theorizing and antagonizes the highly popular genre of autofiction through a series of generic contaminations. Autotheory, in this itinerary, is inseparable from the self-writing project that Preciado undertakes and advocates, one that disidentifies from the fiction of a privately sexed and interior ‘self’. (shrink)

A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! is an entirely original kind of work. It takes the form of commentaries on memes made with the image of Batman slapping Robin. The commentaries are written as if they were not authored by the same person who made the memes, allowing the author to consider himself and his work from the outside. The book defies genre by mixing discussions of philosophy, psychoanalysis, Judaism, language, and representation with self-writing and (...) class='Hi'>autotheory. These are juxtaposed like the items in a cabinet of curiosities or topics in an analytic patient’s free association. Both pre-modern and post-modern in its inspiration, it is cerebral, playful, social, and intensely personal. It contains philosophy, including original philosophical research, but also explores new ways of doing and thinking about philosophy. (shrink)

For better or worse, Barbie (2023) was part of a summer blockbuster phenonemon. Much of the fanfare around the film included conersations about feminism, ‘girlhood’ and whether or not the film was reductive in terms of upholding an iconic yet often criticised doll. This article attempts to wade through that noise by focusing on my own experience of the film as a genderqueer feminist academic. Blending personal reflection with queer theory and feminist critique, I unpack the use of the gender (...) binary in Barbie Land and the implications, if any, for viewers and the overall ‘feminist’ positioning of the film (and whether or not that matters). In particular, I focus on Jack Halberstam's concept of gender failure and what that failure looks like in the idyllic world of Barbie. Following my own feminist epistemological commitments, this article makes use of academic as well as non-academic texts, in addition to blogs and other pop culture sources. Ultimately, this article considers the role of whiteness in the acceptance of the non-normative characters in Barbie – particulalry Weird Barbie – and why it is essential for white queers to remember that their experiences are not the queer experience. (shrink)

Contemporary work in Black Studies reflects the urgency of integrating lived experience into scholarly work. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe employ autobiographical frames and anecdotes in their writing in order to legitimate historically undervalued forms of knowledge production, and, as Hartman writes, to “counter the violence of abstraction.” Despite the efficacy of this methodology, however, the move itself remains under-theorized, even as scholars advocate for the necessity of taking seriously the intellectual labor and output of Black female (...) academics. “The Actual Scale of Breathing” examines the genealogy of Black feminist writers from slave narratives to the contemporary who find themselves in the impossible position of wanting to speak from experience but find the work of self-disclosure harmful. I argue that these writers innovate form to both refuse unearned access to interiority – specifically to white readers – while at the same time cultivating community through the incorporation of a polyphonic authority. (shrink)

Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies. _When Monsters Speak_ showcases the development of Stryker’s writing from the 1990s to the present. It combines canonical pieces, such as “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” with her hard to find earlier work published in zines and newsletters. Brought together, they ground Stryker’s thought in 1990s San Francisco and its innovative queer, trans, and S/M cultures. The volume includes an introduction by editor McKenzie Wark, who highlights Stryker’s connections to developments in (...) queer theory, media studies, and autotheory while foregrounding Stryker’s innovative writing style and scholarly methods. _When Monsters Speak_ is an authoritative and essential collection by one of the most important and influential intellectuals of our time. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is an entangled, more-than-human relational network, shaping and being shaped by the societal, cultural, and political structures in which it is embedded. This paper explores the role of artists as critical practitioners engaging with AI, to examine how AI-generated self-representations materialise identity and reinforce or counter well-known AI biases in gender, race, and embodiment. Drawing on feminist technoscience – particularly its focus on the entanglement of body, environment, and technology – and autotheory, the study treats generative AI (...) as an instrument of vision and voice. Using generative AI to create a partial digital twin, a self-portrait, is situated as an inherently embodied and relational practice. Through a combination of desk-based research and a practice-based, reflexive engagement with RunwayML, the paper documents the author’s attempt to create an identical-looking digital twin, revealing systemic biases embedded in AI-generated self-portraits. The paper uses embodiment as connective tissue linking theoretical and lived experience. Generative AI consistently misrepresented gender and age, defaulting to hyper-feminized aesthetics and youthful features while reliably reproducing Whiteness. The study also critically examines voice cloning and text-to-speech synthesis, highlighting how AI’s training data constrain language, accent, and vocal traits. By positioning AI-generated imagery and voice synthesis as material-discursive practices, the research extends debates on bias, agency, and self-representation in human–machine interactions. It argues that artists working with generative AI not only expose its epistemic limitations but also provide counter-narratives through creative, embodied interventions. The findings highlight the ways artists can help to meet the urgent need for more inclusive AI infrastructures, transparent dataset practices, and a reframing of digital self-representation beyond generative AI’s algorithmic defaults. (shrink)

Inspired by Paul B. Preciado’s work of autotheory, Testo Junkie, and the various processes of self-shaping that circulate through his corpus, this visual piece and its accompanying personal essay draw upon the artist’s familial and ancestral knowledge of their grandmother’s confinement in an asylum. Developing a visual methodology based on the holographic philosophy of Nondual Śaiva Tantra, Techno-Tantrik Embodiment seeks to offer analogous holistic technologies that harness the power of the repressed and the taboo, to transform mind, body and (...) environment. The piece questions how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes and infrastructures, and it provides a mixed-reality approach to consciousness, asking: what types of engagement with image-based systems can subvert and transform our worldview? Utilizing a queer framework that eschews respectability or a quest for ‘positive’ counternarratives, it explores the possible synergies between Tantrik and digital technologies, to build meaningful connections with ourselves and alterity. (shrink)

Danielle Spencer's book, "Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity," does many things. It is a work of autotheory, putting Spencer's own embodied narrative in constant conversation with the testimony of others along with a remarkably diverse set of critical and theoretical approaches. In the book, Spencer coins a new term, "metagnosis", which occurs when one is newly diagnosed in adulthood with a lifelong condition. The book explores Spencer's own metagnostic experience involving her eyesight along with chronicling the experiences (...) of others to highlight the ways in which newfound knowledge of a diagnosis can in itself transform us.Born with strabismus—"misaligned eyes," Spencer is practiced at... (shrink)

My third essay attempts a tentative definition of—and offers up some propositions for—art writing. It begins by demarcating this genre or field of practice from other forms of writing in and around art—in section (1) Precursors and Fellow Travellers. It then goes on to build its argument through eight further themes or propositions: (2) Pitch, Process and Performance. In which I suggest that art writing tends towards the staged or the self-conscious. (3) Scripts, Spells and Voice. In which art writing (...) is seen to often involve performative modes of expression. (4) Other Registers. Here I look to how art writing can involve other forms of representation besides the written word (for example, drawings or found images). (5) Fictioning and the Foregrounding of Method. In which I suggest that art writing often foregrounds imagery and the imagination, especially in terms of conjuring other space-times. (6) Artists’ Books and Novels. In this section, I make the claim that the presentation—in physical form—is important with art writing. (7) Technological Mediations. Here I briefly address art writing in relation to digitalisation and the web. (8) Sites, Scenes and Discursive Communities. In which I address the way in which art writing is often linked to certain sites of publication/distribution and to different scenes. (9) Marked Bodies and a Minor Genre. In this final section, I suggest that art writing can also be a place for marginalised and marked authors and communities (which means it resonates with autofiction and autotheory). These themes/propositions are followed by two codas. The first attends to the art collective I am part of as a case study of art writing, specifically in relation to performance; the second and longer one attends to the possibility that art writing (and indeed theory-fiction) might contribute to the project of decolonisation. (shrink)

In my short Introduction, I introduce the three different kinds of writing practice—theory-fiction, autofiction and autotheory, and art writing—that the following essays concern themselves with. In particular, I briefly lay out some of my provisional argument that these forms of writing not only enact a blurring between genres but also are each performative in some manner. I also introduce the question of place (and circuits) of publication and dissemination of these ‘new’ kinds of writing. This relates not only to (...) what has become known as para-academia (especially as regards theory-fiction) but also to the growth in small presses (especially for art writing). My Introduction also briefly addresses how these ‘new’ forms of writing involve a turn away not only from more typical academic or essayistic writing but also from literary fiction per se (having closer connections to what is sometimes called ‘genre fiction’). It is this position in the margins—and away from at least some gatekeepers—that also means these ‘new’ genres can speak about other experiences and other subject positions. (shrink)

The tension between the popular embrace of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity prompts the contributors to Long Term to explore queer commitments as they are more broadly conceived. The essays contained here de-familiarize the idea of commitment and extend the category of significant others to include animals, possessions, institutions and disciplines. Revitalizing the concerns of queer theory beyond the commitment to anti-normativity, these essays contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship in queer temporality studies, disability studies, autotheory, and the (...) emergent sub-field of age studies. Long Term includes an introduction on notions of the long term and essays that specifically address a number of topics-the commitment to palliative care; long-term attachment and loss; long-term pharmaceutical use; the commitment to pets; fear of commitment and institutionalization; long-term debt and financialization; the racial dimensions of long-term incarceration and voluntarism; queer kinship and racialized reproductive technologies; serial commitment; and the commitment to friendship. (shrink)

This book looks at three different kinds of writing practice - theory-fiction, autofiction/autotheory and art writing - that are increasingly prevalent as genres (or ‘hybrid genres’) in the arts and critical humanities. The chapters in the book operate as a critical survey of these new forms of writing (many examples are listed) whilst at the same time they each work towards some provisional definitions. Some key precursors to these new genres are also identified. The book explores what these new (...) kinds of writing do. What is particular to them or what do they add to those already existing styles and genres (and especially the academic essay and article)? Key here is that each form of writing works in a performative manner or as a device that enables a shift in perspective. A case is made for their urgency in relation to contemporary issues and concerns and for their importance in terms of being both from and for more marginalised communities. The book concludes with a discussion of machine writing and especially our collaboration with artificial intelligent language models. (shrink)

The Argonauts combines high theory and the everyday. It does this by combining lofty thought, the quotidian, close attention to words and ideas and stray thoughts, and desire. It does this through form, the way it blends and refuses genre, the way it skips from one thought or story to another, and making them connect by virtue of contiguity. The Argonauts refuses form in a way that parallels how Maggie's and Harry's bodies and identities refuse gender taxonomy. It also refuses (...) genre, referred to variously as theory, memoir, and autotheory. While it queers form and family, it also queers feelings. (shrink)

This book is a study of BDSM practices based on anthropological fieldwork (a mix of the following methods: participatory research, semi-structured interviews, autotheory) conducted among Polish BDSM practitioners between 2015 and 2020. Instead of focusing on organized kink communities (which are relatively weak in Poland), it instead foregrounds the practice of BDSM itself, and asks what are the conditions (social, cultural, and rhetorical) which make this practice at all possible. In doing so, it builds towards an argument that BDSM (...) practitioners rely on how our ways of understanding and categorizing sex and sexual activities consistently fail to properly describe the errancies of sexual desire in order to carve out a space of kink's possibility for themselves--and that BDSM practices themselves are both enabled by this, and are the means of such carving out. The author investigates a number of practices of contemporary Polish BDSM practitioners, ranging from the very act of attempting to define what BDSM even is all the way to consensually non-consensual simulated drownings. By analyzing them, they ask what relationships are produced through practice--both to other practitioners, as well as to more abstract concepts such as the public sphere, the sexual norm, or the oft-mythologized Western kink culture. In the process, the study also constantly returns to the question of what it means to both practice, as well as think about kink from the half-peripheral, Eastern European perspective. While the book refuses the demand that non-Anglophone authors should prioritize area studies over the production of "theory", it nonetheless locates and analyzes the practices and problems it describes within the specific geographic and cultural context of Poland. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields including queer theory, sexuality studies, and feminist theory. It could also appeal to cultural anthropologists more broadly, and people working with Central-Eastern European cultures. (shrink)

This article considers American writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus’s genre-bending, parodic book I Love Dick as a way to deconstruct divisions that persist between the female “hysteric” and th...

This paper interprets Chris Kraus’s novel Torpor (2006) as an experiment in what could be coined an ‘anthropology of unhappiness’. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism and Sara Ahmed’s critique of happiness as a normative ideal, the analysis presents Sylvie and Jerome as individuals shaped by 20th century trauma, historical awareness, and the exhaustion of the modernist legacy. Their relationship presents the torpor – biological, affective and historical – as a dominant structure of feeling that emerges from Holocaust (...) memory, psychoanalytic impasse and the decline of futurity at the so-called end of history. Through autofiction, Kraus produces a form of life writing that aligns with Gilles Deleuze’s idea of literature as symptomatology: like Sade and Masoch, she portrays subjectivity not as a pathology, but as a diagnostic force. Although torpor appears to be the antithesis of becoming, Kraus also explores how deterritorialized forms of torpor can generate a paradoxical vitality that is aligned with necropolitics. The novel’s feminist rejection of reproductive futurism mirrors Judith Butler’s reinterpretation of Antigone and resonates with queer temporalities that challenge chrononormativity. Ultimately, Torpor charts a transition from melancholic attachment to a new, post-romantic structure of feeling – an affective regime in which unhappiness becomes epistemological and ‘Krausism’ emerges as a 20th century mode of life and thought. (shrink)

This paper focuses on contemporary writing practices that intertwine self-narrative and theory. I try to show that an intelligence of the social world (of class, race gender relations and other forms of domination) is exercised at the level of singular experiences. It is not only that people are different from each other—although I insist on the truth and force of such a banal statement—but also that a renewed sense of objectivity is obtained when theoretical output is reflected from the particular (...) position of the one who enunciates knowledge. This is undoubtedly one of the fundamental lessons of feminist and standpoint epistemologies. (shrink)

This chapter lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for a feminist disability analysis of endometriosis, a chronic gynecological condition that has long been dismissed, pathologized, and misunderstood by medicine. Drawing from feminist disability studies, rhetorical theory, medical humanities, literary criticism, and autotheory, the chapter positions endometriosis not only as a biomedical disorder, but as a cultural, political, and discursive site of power. It critiques the historic and ongoing medical neglect of femme-coded pain and reframes chronic illness as a space (...) of epistemic resistance and feminist knowledge production. Interdisciplinary in scope, the chapter weaves archival inquiry with autotheoretical reflection, showing how personal experience becomes method and how storytelling challenges dominant frameworks of objectivity and clinical detachment. The chapter outlines the book’s structure and purpose, presenting endometriosis as a lens through which to interrogate reproductive injustice, gendered suffering, and the limitations of the medical and social models of disability studies. Through a critical engagement with disability theory and cultural representations of pain, this chapter opens a conversation about the politics of legibility, the need for disability studies to address disabilities that are purely negative in nature, and the radical possibilities of feminist rage. By centering lived experience and challenging dominant logics of normalcy, this chapter calls for a reimagining of what it means to live with, and speak from, pain. (shrink)