AUTOTHEORIES
EDITED BY ALEX BROSTOFF AND VILASHINI COOPPAN
THE MIT PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
LONDON, ENGLAND
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INTRODUCTION
Articulating Autotheories
Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan
It is the very principle of this discourse (and of the text which represents it) that its figures cannot be classified: organized, hierarchized, arranged with a view to an end (a settlement): there are no first figures, no last figures. . . . We have subjugated the series of figures (inevitable as any series is, since the book is by its status obliged to progress) to a pair of arbitrary factors: that of nomination and that of the alphabet.
—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse1
A is for autotheory, an address to alterity, assemblages of amours, aesthetics, affects; B is for Barthes, who brought us into the fold, and also for books, for borderlands of being and belonging; C is for citation, and for critique, for contamination and for conjuring conditions of possibility; skip to T, which is for theory, for theory on T, for taxonomy and telling and tomorrow; U is for us; V veers, comes slantwise at the subject, voluminous vectoring, and vitality; W is for why, for who, for wordsmithing as worldmaking; X marks the spot that marks us, the crossroads where language cuts across; it’s ex and mx and sex and selves in their tangled relations; Y yokes and yields and yearns, yes; Z zigzags among zones— erogenous, linguistic, temporal, disciplinary.
Autotheory’s alphabet: a system with the structure of a dream, like the unconscious of psychoanalysis or the language of poststructuralism. Autotheory’s ABC building blocks, like those of a field in formation, get
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stacked up and knocked down. So too do we make and unmake autotheory’s definitions, disavow it like Barthes, and like him invite you to play. We’ll go first and toss out a definition. Consider it a working definition in antidefinitional style. It is both a capitulation and a resistance to the strictures of an editorial introduction. Autotheory is not a singular utterance articulating a determinant definition. Rather, it’s a collective happening, made in acts of reading and writing that yoke “you” and “I,” acts that don’t issue definitions but unleash and assemble them.
We could start by saying autotheory is a practice that combines autobiographical elements with theory, philosophy, and literary and cultural criticism.2 Autotheory is language play, body talk, technologies of the self, utterances of an “I,” intersections of identifications, declarations of desire, theoretical constellations. In the formulation “Autotheory is X,” X is an invitation to proliferation, to fill in the blank. The structure is that of a copula, where the copular verb (to be) links the subject of the sentence to its complement (the word or phrase necessary to complete the meaning). In this, the moment of autotheory’s definitional eruption, many things can fill in that blank. But one thing persists. In autotheory, the subject is the subject; the theoretical undertaking is a self-making but also a selfbreaking, the dissociation of a putative whole into its constituent parts, fragmentation and reassembly, play. Autotheory makes up and unmakes a self, and the self makes up and unmakes autotheory. A chiastic structure, we know. That X again urges us to see how a structure (unconscious, language, theory) crosses through the subject and how the subject in turn crosses through the structure. That subject, the self of autotheory, is neither singular nor autonomous nor alone.
Autotheory lays bare its intimacies, and so by way of introduction, we also play with others. Somewhere along the journey of this volume, we invited contributors to describe “autotheory”; here is a sampling:
“a movement that dreams of arrival and through that dream sees the self as an architecture of knowledge still being built.”—Erica Richardson
“A metabolizing, testing, and interrogation of theory through the lens of personal experience . . . and a use of theory to make sense of, but also to elevate, personal experience, particularly somatic experience, messy and fallible and
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vulnerable as it is . . . subjective and embodied . . . innovative in form and structure.”—Arianne Zwartjes
“a collision between discordant registers: the conceptual and the confessional; the scientific and the erotic.”—Damon Young
“at its most powerful—a potent modality for informing . . . our understanding of lived realities in the context of systemic power, thereby galvanizing . . . collective action to shift that power toward justice.”—Stacey Young
Autotheory bears resemblances to a self’s story, but spawns a critical multiplicity. Autotheories, as a title, underscores the plurality of both the field and the self that is in part its subject—a self destabilized and made plural by the discourses (with an emphasis on psychoanalysis and poststructuralism) from which it draws.3 Insofar as autotheory is not simply a linear disclosure of a singular self’s trajectory, it distinguishes itself from autobiography and memoir, even as it samples elements of them. Autotheory is a generic hybrid and a textual arrangement, whose assemblages of influence appear as words on the page. There’s something about the autotheoretical as a prose style that overproduces an “I” on the one hand, but on the other, lets loose an associative cascade. Autotheory’s prose can happen in pronouns just as much as in lists, vignettes, anecdotes, charts, dreamscapes, enjambments, citational catchphrases, intertextual webbing, intersubjective weaving. Autotheory is also an arrangement in a larger world of arrangements: ideology’s working, power’s penetration, desire’s reach, discipline’s knowing. It emerges at the sutures and joints; it’s an articulation of articulations. Autotheory’s “I” seeks to push beyond the discursive (even within the written word) and invites us to consider the materialities of bodies and structures within which the “I” is produced and located. Even as autotheory, in Arianne Zwartjes’s words, “strips the pretension of neutrality, of objectivity, away from the theorizing voice,”4 by embedding that voice in the guise of embodiment, autotheory simultaneously reproduces itself as a body of knowledge. It’s a straddle (of disciplines), a strut (of style), a proliferation (of selves), an axis (of identifications), an index (of attachments), an archive (of loves). It’s us (editors and contributors) and you (reader) and we (all of us). Everybody’s autotheory.5
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In a moment when a spate of scholarship seeks to spin origin stories for a form quickly gaining popular attention, where do practitioners of autotheory find their starting point? There is a primal scene in autotheory, which goes something like this: I read X and I realized I could write differently. For so many, it was Maggie Nelson’s award-winning The Argonauts (2015) that catalyzed this process, opening new possibilities of writing against genre conventions through its citational mode. The Argonauts, which so often figures as the American origin story of autotheory, nests another primal scene within it: Nelson reading the discussion of the classical ship the Argo in Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975). The title of Nelson’s book is credited to Barthes; the term “autotheory” to Nelson’s reading of Paul B. Preciado, who stages his own primal scene from the outset of Testo yonqui (2008): reading Guillaume Dustan on the eve of his passing. G is grief, for genre and for gender, for generation.
If citationality is the autotheoretical primal scene’s symptomatic trace, intertextuality and intersubjectivity is where it comes from and what it seeks to work out. Autotheory conjugates: I read, I write; I read you, I write me. Autotheory is writing that emerges from reading, an X marking the spot of encounter where (a certain kind of) reader and (a certain kind of) text not only meet but leak into one another, become kin, undergo a momentary symbiosis like that of a membrane absorbing a substance. Bodily reading, Alex’s intertextual kinship,6 Vilashini’s intimate touch of skin/kin/kind7 reshaping the account of autotheory, the many other formulations of our contributors and their respective antecedents. The form is as portable as genre, the content as distinct as a self, the uptake a signal of incipient institutionalization.
In this regard, we recognize the danger of autotheory becoming a contemporary catchphrase and catch-all for every modish mode of firstperson writing. To its critics, the term risks trendy presentism. The term risks commodity fetishism. The term risks flaunting its cultural capital. The term risks identitarianism. The term risks reification as cottage industry: everyone doing autotheory all the time. Bad. Bad faith. Bad form. In the introduction to the special issue of ASAP/Journal on autotheory, Alex Brostoff and Lauren Fournier problematize “the desire to be radically open to what autotheory could be—without, on the other hand,
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collapsing its criteria to the extent that ‘everything is autotheory.’”8 This openness “risks a loss of referentiality and, with it, an evacuation of meaning: if everything is autotheory, then nothing is autotheory.”9
Sometimes, we worry that autotheory suffers from an everything-butthe-kitchen-sink problem, but then we remember how genre itself (subject, writes Derrida, to “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity”)10 leaks, that autotheory is itself an invitation to porosity, a seepage between different ways of knowing, thinking, writing, and being. Auto and theory push against one another, each retaining its properties even as they leak into one another. This generic drip produces a flow interior to the form itself. That flow is movement between self and other, subject and social, between styles of knowing and practices of being, but also between those forms traditionally thought to house theory (e.g., academic scholarship) and those forms in which the self is foregrounded (e.g., autobiography, memoir, reverie, vignette). Leak, flow, drip, all but the kitchen sink: we are proliferating metaphors. Isn’t autotheory itself sometimes charged with overworking, with a self-indulgent too-much-ness, an overload of the “I”? It is this very formulation that this volume contests, locating affect, aesthetics, politics, and the relational in autotheory’s excess.
Autotheory’s capaciousness, its invitation to play, yields its current consolidation and capacity to alter established disciplinary discourses. To date: one monograph, five special issues, a spate of articles,11 and of course the autotheorical fount itself, emerging in contentious and complex relation to the intersecting crises of neoliberalization’s identitarian reduction of the self to consumer, the conservative backlash against marginalized communities, late-stage capitalism, populism and polarization, the pandemic, and the so- called “post-truth” mediascape. Against this backdrop, autotheory’s structuring conditions are as decisive as its forms. Autotheory is a product of this moment, but also of prior ones, be it a half century of poststructuralism’s investigation of the self in/as language or a parallel and interlinked tradition of BIPOC, crip, neurodivergent, working- class, feminist, queer, and trans writers seizing a collective voice through the register of the “I.” This volume unravels—and braids together—both of these genealogies, asking what happens when historically marginalized frameworks and subjects are interlaced with theoretical traditions long associated with self-reflexivity.
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Autotheories does not attempt a comprehensive survey (after all, the field’s bibliography may have doubled by the time this volume goes to press) but rather offers a kaleidoscopic snapshot of autotheory’s many current iterations and permutations. That range is no transient trend; one sign of autotheory’s arrival is its dissemination. Disciplinary uptakes provide one of the angles this volume takes, showcasing work in literary criticism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, trans and queer theory, Black studies, new media studies, and more. Even if autotheory is germane to the literary, its methodologies and concepts, like those of theory itself, are traveling. Just as the autoethnographic turn, which was so much a part of anthropology, imprinted several disciplines’ work, autotheory is moving across disciplinary practices and objects, providing an interstitial zone of interrogation. In the wake of the autotheoretical primal scene (I read that, I now write this), disciplines begin to borrow one another’s modes, to create new couplings. We are not only noting that individual chapters in this volume perform transdisciplinary feats; we are also making a claim for autotheory as a transdisciplinary form that derives from a constitutive panoply of case studies, divergent genealogies, experimental encounters, and performative practices. The “trans” of transdisciplinarity, not unlike the “trans” of transgender, moves across, transcending boundaries, refusing borders. Autotheory urges us to read bodies of knowledge as we read bodies (and words): as regulated by institutionalized discourses; as insurgences against those very structures; and as points of contact with one another.
Autotheory, this volume proposes, is less about what defines and confines the self than about what orbits it into relation. As Kyle Frisina explains with respect to the ethical work of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, autotheory “might be most capaciously understood as . . . an embodied relationality that may (or may not) spark recognition, but is fundamentally premised on the exchange of attention and address.”12 As contributor Stacey Young noted in the nineties, autotheory is an effort to fit “word to world”13 and, as Jan Grue illustrates in this volume, “to fit world to word”; in other words, to bring into relation. Autotheorists’ turn to the self, as Young has written, “presents the lives they chronicle as deeply enmeshed in other lives, and in history, in power relations that operate on multiple levels simultaneously.”14 Autotheory articulates the “I” alongside
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others, in dialogue with larger debates about subjectivity, the self’s position within the political, the continuous readerly-writerly dialogue that is theory, and the indelible mark of bodies imprinting themselves on styles and genres of knowledge and vice versa.
Such relational making in turn entails a shift in how we read. This volume engages understandings of autotheory as a genre of writing and, to cite Fournier, a feminist practice, while also conceptualizing it as a mode of reading (see, for example, Lili Owen Rowlands’s chapter). There is by now a set of generic criteria that invite us to know autotheory when we read it: intertextuality, citation (often of critical theory, philosophy, and the texts that loom so large in those primal scenes), the first-person, revelation, graphic physicality, experiential knowledge, personal vignettes, cinescapes of longing, a political analysis of present conditions and future possibilities. If there is a canon, as Stacey Young said long ago and Fournier rearticulated more recently, of “autotheoretical texts,” it calls to mind Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Nelson, Preciado, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Claudia Rankine, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Sedgwick, Chris Kraus, Christina Crosby, Sara Ahmed, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Alison Bechdel, and McKenzie Wark, among a multitude of others beyond the Western European, US, and Anglophone tradition.15 The work of this volume, however, is neither canon creation nor canon revision, but rather the demonstration of multiple modes of autotheoretical reading. R is for relation and for reading.
Understanding autotheory as a mode of reading enables a partial suspension of the question of canonicity in acknowledgment of the structuring categories of language, body, and self that cut across its texts. After all, a long tradition of autobiographical writers—from Augustine to Montaigne to Rousseau and beyond—has refracted larger, sociohistorical structures into the boundaries and limits of the self. It is not our contention that these writers are practitioners of autotheory nor origins of its so-called canon, but rather that they are readable through its lens.16 Read through autotheory, literary avatars of the auto and the linear story of a modern, masculinist self they represent become antecedents less of a transhistorical “I” than of a dialectic between the structures that make a subject and the forms that express it. Autotheoretical reading puts readers and texts in proximity, in
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circles of connection and contention that resist positing one as the agent of the other. Readers make texts and texts make readers. Autotheoretical reading asks that we enter that spiral: its scribbles and ripples, emanations from something we once called the author, then named text, and in autotheory stitch together, alongside the reader themselves.
To read autotheoretically is to catch hold of this relation. In this sense, autotheoretical reading joins Eve Sedgwick’s affective topographies of reading beside. 17 Where (paranoid) reading beneath, behind, and beyond engages the “topos of depth of hiddenness, typically followed by a drama of exposure and tending to implicit narratives of respectively origins and telos,” (reparative) reading beside “comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and all relations.”18 Sedgwick’s animate reading beside, like our additive alphabetic opening and the lists that litter our thinking, recognizes that reading is always readers reading readers: a citational circuit of attachments, affiliations, alliances. In this, autotheoretical reading, like reparative reading, is not simply a hermeneutic plunge from the outside in, but rather a being with and in texts. Autotheoretical reading grants us a grammar for a relational subject. Autotheory isn’t just a self writing itself (surfacing a preexisting self whose essence or identity is discoverable in language) but rather a self writing itself by reading other selves (a self made proximate to others through the act of reading). Autotheoretical reading is a mode of relation delivered by, in, and as language.
AUTOTHEORY IS A SUBJECT; AUTOTHEORY’S SUBJECTS
The “auto” of autotheory is no transparently knowable or stable thing. Much the same is true of “theory” . . . 19 —Robyn Wiegman
Autotheory is an object of study that takes the subject as its object. In autotheory the self can be enlarged, like a Borgesian map, to the contours of the field; multiplied, like a many-headed Hydra; mirrored by its medium like Narcissus’s reflection in the pool; distorted by language’s
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stone-skipping. If on the one hand there is no definition of autotheory that does not encompass or interrogate the self, on the other hand there is no practice of self that does not burst its own boundaries. Both methodological container and critical rupture, autotheory as a field toggles between making and unmaking. It brings into being a self that is often mistaken as its origin. This is what makes autotheory anti- essentialist. Contrary to the French feminism with which it is often compared, autotheory is not generated from a self secured by its own identitarian mores, that self who arrives at home in their body by virtue of writing. Rather, autotheory follows the ripples that language’s stones cast in the waters of subject- object relations.
How can the subject of autotheory—as a transdisciplinary field, and as self (comprised as text on the one hand and body on the other)—be approached? Two approaches predominate in the recent scholarship. Stacey Young, who contributes a retrospective assessment to this volume and whose Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement (1997) inaugurated the adjective “autotheoretical,” insists precisely on the merging of critique and lived experience. So too do Lauren Fournier, Arianne Zwartjes, and other practitioners of embodied feminist theorizing, including many of the contributors to the special double issue of Feminist Studies on “Autotheory/Autoethnography.”20 This approach offers a different emphasis from the theoretical genealogies plotted out in the special issues of Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory (2020) edited by Robyn Wiegman and the American Book Review (2022) edited by Laura Cernat, in which autotheory is primarily a function of its language and in which its bodies can only be known, if at all, through mediations of language. McKenzie Wark has recently invited us to consider the “autotextual” as a tactic that describes how “these practices made this self. These institutions, these historical circumstances.”21 If, in Wiegman’s and Cernat’s approaches to autotheory’s genealogy, language is the very vehicle of selfhood, then Wark’s Marxist-inflected autotextuality acknowledges the structuring conditions of subject formation, while in Young’s, Fournier’s, and Zwartjes’s approach, embodied experience delivers the subject to itself. Autotheory’s hallmark writing about the body—so important to BIPOC, crip, neurodivergent, workingclass, feminist, queer, and trans theorists—is an insurgent call to occupy
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the House of Theory with the physical and psychic details of an embodied subject, a pulsing perceptual apparatus that turns thought to prose, recalling Preciado’s “body- essay, a somatico-political fiction.”22 Autotheory is not always or only the body, however; alongside arguments that embody the genre are invocations of autotheory’s language, its books, quotations, fragments, and snippets, as textual bodies that themselves make up a subject. That language in turn chases embodiment.
The poststructuralist slant in each of us as editors pushes us to put language’s play before embodiment’s pull; meanwhile, our two bodies, which animate this discursive production, push us to center materialities of many kinds: structural, systemic, institutional, corporeal. It’s not enough to simply rehearse the opposition between language and materiality. In fact, autotheory insists upon the materiality of language, the ways in which its structures produce selves and shape communities. And it’s not easy to dismiss the legitimating function of the autotheoretical text, the way its “I” makes visible and takes possession of experience. At the same time, those narratives are sites of investment for other readers who see in them parts of themselves. One of the most difficult parts of writing this introduction has been trying to catch hold of these diametrically opposed frameworks: on the one hand, autotheory’s body (the leaky membrane) and on the other hand, autotheory’s words (linguistic mediation). Add to that the disciplinary straddle of having fallen for the language of poststructuralism even as we question its limitations and to some extent resist it. This is not a question of whether words fail or succeed (the problem with which Nelson’s The Argonauts opens). Rather, it is a recognition of autotheory’s venture to materialize a self that comes to be—including in its most visceral or corporeal ways—in language. In opposition to the notion of the self’s delivery of itself as knowable, we insist that the auto of autotheory is mediated. This is what Wiegman evokes as autotheory’s post-poststructuralist self and what we have glossed as the subject cut across by a language that is opaque to it.23 This is a self cognizant, to echo Judith Butler, of the impossibility of giving an account of oneself,24 and cognizant too of the ways in which an “I” is produced and marginalized by normative regimes of knowing and doing. The implications are significant for the kinds of theoretical genealogies produced in this volume.
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While, as we detail below, we insist on multiple genealogies, we remain committed to the following proposition: aided and frustrated by the language of theory, autotheory acknowledges that its own subject cannot be known in an unmediated way. If one of poststructuralism’s great lessons is that language and representation constitute the subject, then “lived experience,” which has so often been invoked as the grounds or source of an autotheory, is likewise produced in its discursive articulation. D is for discourse, for difference and différance, for desire.
We could have titled this section “Autotheory Is a Body; Autotheory’s Bodies.” If, for some, autotheory’s bodies are autotheory’s words are autotheory’s subjects, then how to retain the radical specificity of each of those? Constituents, participants, doubters, dissenters, believers: what does autotheory make of us? The capaciousness of this field rescrambles philosophical attachments, convening unlikely and in some cases contradictory schools of thought. Can we have language and the body too? In autotheory, the graphic is graphic after all. What’s written in language represents bodies in their tender, wet ontologies.25 F is for flesh and for form, for feminisms and fissures, for fucking. For all the definitions of autotheory that have appeared on the scenes, few respond to Jamieson Webster’s resounding question: where’s the sex?26 Remember that Nelson’s The Argonauts opens with “a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall,” while Preciado’s Testo Junkie opens with an (auto-) “Videopenetration” lubricated with Testogel.27 In this volume, the sex can be botanical (Webster), figural (Freccero), and trans (Solís and Goldberg); it is the point where language runs up or rubs up against its own leaky limits. Words ooze. Sex scenes are not Foucauldian confessionals but poetics, aesthetics, politics of pleasure and play, residues of the unbearable relationality of being. Autotheory’s body talk, its many descriptive iterations of corporealization, does not just image the body in language, but seeks to animate it. Through the lessons of poststructuralism, autotheory torques and twists the body on the moebius strip of sex and language. For Preciado, what comes out is a subject whose very pores and orifices are penetrated by biopolitical mechanisms of control; for Nelson, what comes out is a subject whose most intimate, personal registers are its primary bonds to the world. Although autotheory often takes sex as a
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starting point, it is not an écriture of the body, the written expression of a preexistent entity, but rather a situating of the body’s relational economies and a corporealization of its grammars.
If the long tradition of graphocentric subjectivity from Rousseau and onward positions the self in and as language, then autotheory corporealizes both self and word, a vintage performativity in whose discursive coils identifications proliferate. This volume insists that autotheory thus stages and interrogates the self’s encounter with its own conditions of possibility. Discussing autotheory and autofiction, Laura Cernat shows that while visibility may make certain social sanctions possible for queer subjects, its whiteness washes over and against QTBIPOC autotheories, whose presence remains underrepresented in emergent field-making efforts.28 As Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017) crucially reminds us, rather than result in inclusivity, the trap of increased visual representation has, on the contrary, resulted in an uptick of violence against trans—and especially trans of color— communities.29 This volume aims to honor the work of trans, queer, and BIPOC autotheories, as well as of their genealogies in writings by women of color in the seventies and eighties, which have labored to surface the stakes of structural invisibility.30 However, to make a subject visible is not to render it transparently knowable. Where Rachel Lallouz assigns autotheory “a unique schematics of intelligibility that penetrates and shatters invisibility,”31 this volume lingers with autotheory’s opacity to itself—arguably inevitable, given that it comes to us through language. In this sense, we draw from the dissonance that Édouard Glissant attributes to the tension between textual opacity and the writer as well as the reader’s own opacity.32 “This self that I am is most opaque to me,” Butler writes in the opening sentence of their contribution, and “it is at best awkwardly related to my authorial voice.” Because autotheory tests the limits and pushes the boundaries of what constitutes a self conjured in writing, it doesn’t always imply identity in the way earlier moments and movements have. The “auto” of autotheory has been a subject of theoretical interventions and innovations in theories of the subject over the past half century. The efflorescence of the prior in new forms enables us to think both historically about autotheory’s emergence and about what it simultaneously brings to light and occludes. While some chapters in this volume
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follow in the footsteps of Wiegman’s investigation of the long autotheoretical encounter with poststructuralism,33 others pursue autotheory as a body politic, writing back against the alleged House of Theory, with its conspicuously gendered and raced exclusions. This volume reaffirms the poststructuralist genealogy, as in Carla Freccero’s insistence that words are not bodies and that neither language nor embodiment suggests or delivers knowability, Butler’s reckoning with the legibility of the speaking subject and the viability of shared life, and Preciado’s journey through the detritus of the subject. At the same time, the volume foregrounds a parallel and, in some cases, overlapping tradition in women of color feminisms with embodied modes of theorizing and investment in collective political action, as emphasized by Stacey Young, Erica Richardson, and Arianne Zwartjes in this volume, Fournier elsewhere, and Lorde, Anzaldúa, and Moraga.34 This volume further seeks to make visible BIPOC, crip, neurodivergent, working class, feminist, queer, and trans interventions that have enabled autotheory to be articulated precisely as embodied theorizing (represented in this volume by Solís, Grue, Goldberg, Moodie, and others). Yet another genealogy (represented by Richardson in this volume and Cooppan elsewhere) traces the incendiary and insurgent first-person locutions germane to anticolonial Black studies from Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois to Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe.35 A final genealogy in this volume, one that hails from new media studies (represented by Damon Young in this volume), stages the provocation of a self disaggregated by digital culture given the social scripting of influencers and phatic performances of selfhood that drain that very self. Digital autotheory thus reckons with an “auto” untethered from the anthro. Future disciplines also begin to surface as the volume opens up dialogue about environmental and animal autotheories (through Webster’s and Freccero’s contributions), though this is only the beginning of adoptions of the form.
Beyond this matrix of genealogies, we seek an account that would allow us to think more capaciously about autotheory’s affects of belonging, (dis)identifications, tender interlocutions, philosophical multiplicities, and political imperatives. In tracing the self’s narrativization through autotheoretical texts, its relation to the register of desire and the template of the psyche, and its animation through digital media, we signal a self in the process of unbinding from the very narratives that describe it; a self on
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the run, proliferating multiple accounts of relational subjectivity that exceed autotheory’s “I.”36 Autotheory’s multiple and varied selves reimagine the subject as philosophical category, political agent, and narrative voice. Its “I” is relational and compositional. It is both made and unmade by language, body, desire, the other. The very slippage between language and embodiment, “I” and its others, condition autotheory’s politics. I is for “I,” for interpretation and interpellation. An indexical “I” whose identity is ideologically and intertextually infiltrated; an intersubjective imaginary. Who, then, is in autotheory and for whom is it?
AUTOTHEORY IS A HOUSE; AUTOTHEORY’S HOUSES
¿Acaso mi política no es la vuestra, mi casa no es la vuestra, mi cuerpo no es el vuestro?37
Isn’t my politics yours; my house, my body, yours?38
—Paul Preciado
It’s the “vuestra” that gets banished from the house of English. Where the possessive pronoun “your” signifies in both the singular and the plural, the formality of “vuestra,” germane to the castellano of Spain, is decidedly, overtly, second-person plural: you all, all of you. Don’t my politics belong to all of you, isn’t my house all of yours, isn’t my body all of yours? In Preciado’s Testo yonqui (2008), a plural apostrophe, which hails deceased characters and live readers at once, stakes a grounds of comparison that would bind what is mine to what is yours. Be it politics, house, or body, the negative interrogative, strung across the syntax three times, insists on equivalence. No es . . . no es . . . no es? Isn’t it . . . isn’t it . . . isn’t it?
“Yes” is the implicit answer; in autotheory’s house what’s mine is yours. Like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, autotheory’s home is uncanny; heimlich and unheimlich, a place we find ourselves returning to, surprised by the guise in which it appears even as we recognize its claim on us. One element of autotheory’s uncanny recursivity is the primal experience of reading someone else’s story and becoming yourself a link in the chain of readers reading readers: you are yourself and another in that moment. In this volume, in a primal scene of disidentification with autotheory’s
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predominantly white citational circle, Erica Richardson echoes Toni Morrison in asking, “Whose house is this? . . . This house is strange. Its shadows lie. / Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?”39 To build on Richardson’s query, we ask: whose house is the house of autotheory? What is locked in autotheory’s house might seem to be the subject. But when you enter autotheory’s house, as writer or reader, the self you seek (linguistic, corporeal) is not the only one you find; it is one mediated, multiplied, and transposed into the key of the other.
In light of how this house is built, what then are autotheory’s affordances?40 What are its violences? Whose stories does it tell, in whose voices, and to what ends? To what extent does autotheory’s heavily citational form, addressing and citing an other, risk ventriloquizing?41 In other words, when and how does autotheory’s “I” occlude or silence its “you”? No, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” as Audre Lorde puts it, and so we wonder: what kind of tool is autotheory? In wielding autotheory is there a risk of reinscribing an oppression—being spoken for—that should be the object it is dismantling? These questions are cautionary notes, reminding us to be on the lookout for moments in which autotheory is at risk of both situating the other as its foil and becoming fixed itself, enlarging the “I” at the expense of the “you.” Especially when autotheory is at risk of reduction to the next vehicle de rigueur for self-articulation, its house calls for constant retooling. We thus seek the big affordances of the form, its voicing from the subaltern spaces of what is outside the dominant and its opening to yet unwritten futures. When you open the door of autotheory, where does it lead? Another domestic metaphor: Ahmed writes that theory happens at the kitchen table.42 It was, after all, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press that published the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back in 1983. And This Bridge is one of Young’s earliest examples of autotheoretical texts. Sink, table, house, home: Is autotheory a means, to echo Ahmed, of “bringing feminist theory home”?43 And if so, then, as Richardson asks, “whose house is this?”44 Autotheory is where the everyday, the ordinary, the domestic, the quotidian conjure a world, a world produced by and thus inextricably bound to the social and the structural. That world may be shot through with friction, conflict, and dissonance, for autotheory’s utterances of “I” mark a world once shattered and rebuilt. This is, after all, the principle of
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Barthes’s and Nelson’s Argo, that ship whose parts are replaced though its name remains. Autotheory’s house is haunted not only by its past but by the very things to which its subject says no: the domesticating of norms, the taxonomizing of identities, the schooling of selves, the disciplining of knowledges. Autotheory’s modes of hybrid play revel and rebel in the self’s name against the boundaries of categories, genres, and theoretical traditions. The resulting transdisciplinary forms are indexes of places, literal and conceptual, where a subject has found itself not to “fit” and has forged a new account accordingly. Ahmed characterizes feminist writing as emerging from “how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it.”45 If “feminism is homework because we have much to work out from not being at home in a world,”46 then autotheory is homework because we have much to work out from not being at home in a world, a body, or a language.
This is one intimate vein of autotheory’s politics, the effort to articulate one’s resistances and find one’s belonging. Nelson’s version of this ushers home, body, and family under the banner of queerness, while for Preciado there can be no distinction between body and body politic; the pores of the body he writes are penetrated by biopolitical power. Ingested like the pill or absorbed like his 236- day T-protocol, biopolitics is swallowed or seeps through the skin, producing an “experimental body.” Part of autotheory is precisely the modularity of the body, its status as a unit that can be assembled, building-block style, to construct different structures of inclusion and exclusion. “Isn’t my politics yours; my house, my body, yours?,” Preciado asks.47 Autotheory’s politics, contributors to this volume show, is not simply a vertical scaling up (body to house to community to world) but a horizontal assemblage, a piecing together of a self whose own politics is always shot through and tested with that of others— other selves, other histories, other structures of belonging, other aspirations. P is for politics, for positionality and piecemeal, for privilege and precarity, for potentiality.
In autotheory’s transdisciplinary travels, some approaches in fact knock these ideas down. Damon Young’s digital studies notion of the phatic, for example, evacuates the very notion of the body that Preciado and others would call foundational to autotheory. What’s built up by one autotheoretical scaffolding gets knocked down by another and rebuilt in
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a new shape. Autotheory’s house can take many shapes, just like its body and its “I.” A popular generic misconception would claim that the “I” is what produces the autotheory; we think it’s the opposite and that chicken and egg sequences fail to capture the very notion of a nonautonomous “I.” Before and beyond autotheory’s “I” are the structuring conditions of its production, which is precisely what becomes that “I”s object of encounter, as much as the others that make up its intimate worlds. In this moebius strip, the “I” is always conjoined to the structures that produce it, and against which it writes. Articulated otherwise, we are claiming that autotheory is not about the self, if by the self we mean a freestanding agent of expression. On the contrary, autotheory is relational in its indelible encounter with other selves and structures.
Autotheory’s “I” is constructed by politics, but this is not another iteration of “the personal is political.” Though the very phrasing “autotheory’s house” leans into a domestic metaphor, its political history ranges beyond the tenets of second-wave feminism, with its liberal individualism, and cishet, white, class-privileged locations and locutions. Arianne Zwartjes’s chapter introduces the term “autopolitics,” drawing on Ann Cvetkovich’s description of affect studies’ attempt to “bring emotional sensibilities to bear on intellectual projects and to continue to think about how these projects can further political ones as well . . . for example, cultural activism, academic institutions, and everyday and domestic life.” We echo Cvetkovich’s claim that “it has become important to take seriously the institutions where we live (as opposed to always feeling like politics is somewhere else out there).”48 Out there (in the world), in here (in the self/ body/psyche): if we acknowledge that we have them both because they are inextricable from each other, what else can we achieve politically?
A utopian strain in autotheorizing imagines an alternative to a neoliberal moment in which identities are calcifying, structures of belonging constricting. At the risk of oversimplifying a critical divide, while some invest in the political potentiality of autotheory’s relational web, others suspect that the discourse of subjectivity partially occludes all that unevenly structures it.49 At the end of their contribution to this volume, Butler asks us to consider “what world acts on us as we act, forming us as subjects with the power to act, even to act in common?” If autotheoretical skepticism concerns itself predominantly with how we are acted upon, then this
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volume seeks an autotheoretical imaginary that articulates how the world acts on us as we act, how we are formed as subjects with the power to act, and above all, how we might act in common.
The pandemic raises the stakes of this predicament, both intensifying the experience of trying to get outside of ourselves by writing about relations to others, and creating a community of those writing and reading autotheory together. This volume, like all the recent scholarship on autotheory, was conceived during the pandemic. A lockdown baby, the academic discourse around the emergence and nature of autotheory was also an effect of the peculiar intimacies of working from home, mired in selfhood, seeking encounters through the ether, letting words translate us across distance to make community. Frustrated by the dangers of sharing air and touch, for readers the affective intimacies so often invoked in autotheory hit a nerve in pandemic times. The COVID-19 pandemic is the house of this volume’s autotheories; it magnified some of the reasons we turn to autotheory: In speculating about where autotheory came from, we have also asked what it is and what it can do. Autotheory’s now, we venture, is to some extent always that of politics, and it is a politics to come. In autotheory’s house, the past constantly produces, interrupts, and ruptures the conditions of the present, creating both uncanny resurgences and speculative futures, places into which we have yet to arrive. At the time of this writing, autotheory as a term and as a field in formation is still young, its futures still uncertain and unfolding. Part of our optimism is the imagining of more critical and more capacious homes.
AUTOTHEORY IS AN ENCOUNTER; AUTOTHEORY’S ENCOUNTERS
We are separate people trying to stay in sync and to take in what isn’t, to work with the heat of a proximity that echoes, extends, or hesitates into forms of life.
We cannot know for whom the text will become a riot, a notice, a wormhole or mote.
—Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart50
We wrote this introduction together, in an echo of the plurality of autotheory’s self, words flitting across screens and joining our contributors’
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as we assembled the house of Autotheories. Echoes, extensions, and hesitations spanned across pandemic time; virtual proximity enabled us to stay in sync, and to write as two voices spun into one. This exercise was at once encounter, collaboration, construction, and confabulation, a making up of what makes up the field, and us—two selves whose putative singularities are unmade in reading, remade in writing, and constructed in relation. If the turn to an “auto-” appears at odds with acts of collectivity, this, we have argued, is precisely autotheory’s characteristic affordance. It is what situates autotheory at the juncture of discourses of the self and other; it is what gives autotheory its politics. Autotheories emerges from this crossroads.
In constructing the volume, we ourselves had a primal scene of autotheory; a recognition that says, yes, that’s it, the thing I want to do, the thing that is doing me. As we were jigsawing the chapters together, we realized that the volume’s structural logic is haunted by Testo Junkie’s alternation between “auto” and “theory” chapters, the former chronicling Preciado’s T-based protocol, the latter describing the biopolitical structures of late capitalism that penetrate that self.51 We surface this revelation in the story the volume tells by syncopating chapters that voice a self and chapters that map a field; or, put otherwise, chapters that perform the subject of an autotheoretical “I” and chapters that approach an autotheoretical “I” as their object. But it’s hard to say where one stops and where another starts.
Chapters stage a series of autotheoretical encounters, evoking a range of experiments with form, voice, and knowledge, and traversing texts, readers, writers, and the worlds that shape them. Individual chapters reckon with autoethnography and autofiction, women of color feminism, poststructuralism, the Black radical tradition, trans/queer studies, and disability studies. Some essays are squarely within autotheory’s camp, while others lurk at its edges. Contributors take their cue from philosophical, psychoanalytic, decolonial, trans, and critical race approaches but regularly transgress critical boundaries and bridge stylistic registers, crafting language that is at once critical, intimate, playful, and insurgent. The resulting range of idioms disrupts typical delivery mechanisms, juxtaposing single-authored critical essays, autotheoretical experiments, and interrogations of the field’s underpinnings. As this volume unfolds, dialogue
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further emerges as part of an autotheoretical encounter: Judith Butler reading Spinoza in their parent’s basement, Emma Lieber and her students, Jessica Bush and John Patterson, writing to one another in an autotheory seminar, Jan Grue sorting through the archive of his own medical records, Damon Young’s viewing of vloggers performing selfhood for an absent audience, and the very last essay that Migueltzinta Solís will write about Ira Adelman. Scenes proliferate: unconscious basement, classroom, clinic, bedroom, digital ether, disciplinary enclave. Autotheory’s locales, if you will. Our editorial engagement with these scenes and locales is yet another layer of encounter, as is our co-writing, and your reading. The essays’ back and forth between meditations on disciplinary knowledge and autotheoretical writings—autotheoretical staccato—in turn invite a readerly legato. Slow down and listen to conversations within and at the edges of multiple disciplines as they encounter the pulse of an “I.” Autotheory’s reading is a contrapuntal practice, a listening to another’s “I” in tandem with your own. It is how our contributors themselves read, how the assembled essays speak to one another, and how we hope that you yourself will encounter the volume.
The opening section, “Body Disciplines,” stages encounters with spaces of learning. The encounter with autotheory’s body of knowledge is felt as much as it is known. It schools its readers both in its own subjects and in themselves as subjects, discursive products of textual encounters migrating out from the page. To practice autotheory is already to have been a reader of it, to have been schooled in it while marking it up as one’s own. The intimate encounter with a body of knowledge plays out in classroom scenes and disciplinary schemes as contributors grapple with the terms by which autotheory hails them. In their various recognitions of autotheory lies an account of various adjacencies: autotheory and the theory of the subject, autotheory and the knowledge of the body, autotheory and the act of institutionalized learning.
In the opening essay, “Impossible Professions: Autotheory, Psychoanalysis, Pedagogy,” Emma Lieber introduces an epistolary exchange between her students, Jessica Bush and John Patterson, which stages the intersections between autotheory, psychoanalysis, and pedagogy— discourses that often bear ambivalent relations to one another, or even repress their own origins in the other. Transmission, Lieber, Bush, and
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Patterson illustrate, is a performative procedure through which change transpires along the axes of form and content. Mobilizing transmission, citation, transference, address, and resistance as questions that cut across psychoanalysis, autotheory, and pedagogy, Lieber and her students offer the autotheoretical scene as a collective construct. The interpretive imperative that Lieber and her students describe is in part the subject of Jan Grue’s “That Obscure Object of Embodiment: On Autotheory’s Disciplinary Knowledges.” Countering the singular narratives and epistemological closures that are a defining feature of disciplinary knowledge production within the sociology of health, Grue foregrounds an autotheoretical approach to the ways in which disability studies and the discourse of diagnosis come to bear on the social production of embodiment. For Grue, autotheoretical analysis entails not just the inclusion of biographical material but its interpretation within a theoretical framework, the limits of which autotheory also reveals. Situating herself as the very autotheoretical subject that Grue describes, Megan Moodie narrates the tension between her training as an anthropologist and her experience of chronic pain in “Autoethnography, Undone: Toward a Crip Critique of Ethnographic Realism.” Moodie’s chapter describes what it means to be undone by pain and how that experience pushes her toward nonrealist representation in the form of vignettes about diagnosis as well as fantasy sequences and dialogues with other theorists of pain and illness, creating in that citational chorus a “we” that resounds against the essay’s “I.” This echoing of autotheory’s relational articulation places Moodie’s article in conversation with both Grue’s exploration of the body disciplines through which disability’s self emerges and Lieber’s staging of conversational scenes. Reconceiving these disciplines, rl Goldberg’s “This Baby’s Got the Feel of a Girl: Trans Memoir, Autotheory, and Feeling as Oneself” takes up the question of embodiment by decoupling “feeling trans” from epistemologies of wrong embodiment in order to develop a less tautological phenomenology of trans gender subjectivity. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s theorization of rivetedness, this chapter offers a theory of corporeality for trans phenomenology, and in turn impacts phenomenologies of selfhood and embodiment.
In a dialectical turn, the second section of the volume, “Threshold Movements,” poses a series of challenges to the body disciplines that
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precede it by situating autotheory in distinct methodological moments. While some of these essays insist on the primacy of “lived experience,” and seek to vocalize marginalized genealogies of autotheory, others return to textuality as a formative autotheoretical mode, throwing into question the capacity of language to grant access to the body and its knowledges. French poststructuralism provides some ground on which to interrogate the history and transformation of “writing the body,” including when it is nonhuman. Questioning the location of autotheory primarily as body discourse, these chapters take up oversights and failures, looking at places autotheory has yet to fully reckon with, such as the occluded place of the animal, climate change, racism, colonialism, capitalism, and the repressed histories of Black feminism. Some of these chapters uphold the utopian possibility of collective action provoked by autotheory’s insistence on the structural, the systemic, and the social; others remain skeptical.
Carla Freccero’s “The Auto- of Theory” interrogates the “auto” as narrowing rather than realizing the theoretical’s aspirations to collectivity. Foregrounding how figuration mediates the relationship between theory and autobiography, Freccero reads the discourse of the “auto” as a symptom: the making visible of an “I” that emerges not in embodiment but in language. Taking her cue from Derrida’s invocation of autozoobiography, Freccero ultimately explores the possibility of an auto- other that is more than human: an autozootheory. Drawing on the divergent genealogy of intersectional feminism in the 1980s, Stacey Young’s “Our Autotheoretical Lives” reprises her argument in Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement (1997) that “autotheoretical texts” are a mode of discursive activism. For Young, autotheoretical texts are those that present subjective experience and identity as shaped by structures of power and utopian visions of community and change. Young’s essay interrogates her own positioning as a white woman in relation to her Black partner and family within and against structures of racism, and in the context of global climate catastrophe, casting autotheory as a means to catalyze action. This narrative of autotheory’s utopian potential, however, runs up against exclusions old and new, as Erica Richardson describes in “‘I’ll Take You There’: Reading Autotheory through Black Feminism.” Even as scholars of autotheory make gestures toward the racialization
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of subjectivity, few centralize the critical purchase of Black feminism as it critiques autotheory’s canon formation and institutionalization. Richardson’s intertextual encounter with Nelson’s The Argonauts and Black women’s cultural production traces two very different reception histories for theories of the self, and calls for an examination of how autotheory and Black feminism afford one another the opportunity to examine how subjectivity deemed capable of theorizing is always already racialized. Through the lens of critical whiteness studies, Arianne Zwartjes’s “Failure Notes: Toward a Self-Praxis of Failure” then lays claim to imperfection as a mode of critical refutation. Adopting autotheory as a tool for rethinking racialized constructs of self and other, Zwartjes explores how shame, guilt, and perfectionism are mobilized to enforce white supremacy. Embracing failure in the name of a process of subject formation that is never complete, the essay shows how a subjectivity composed by fragments assembles a strategy of resistance. Written in experimental form, this piece performs the fragmented thoughts that make up an “I” seeking to shatter its positionality and reposition itself in relation to a plural, collective “we.” Finally, in opposition to autotheory’s praxis of failure, Lili Owen Rowlands’s “Begging to Differ: Autofiction, Autotheory, and Contemporary French Feminisms” circles back to Freccero’s focus on the French context, but with a difference. Comparing autofiction (that sexual confessional vein which reigned supreme among French feminist writers in the late 1990s and early 2000s) with autotheory, Owen Rowlands argues that the latter emerges from the exhaustion of the former. An autotheoretical reading of Anne F. Garréta’s Not One Day (2002) and Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory (2006) shows how their narrative experiments in transnational dialogue with Anglo-American queer feminisms range beyond the confines of autobiographical and autofictional writing to retool sex, desire, and sexual violence into autotheoretical experiences of subject formation.
If the volume’s opening section asks how the lingering presence of a constituted “I” surfaces disciplinary paradigms (psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, trans studies, literature) and their transformations, the second section explores how that “I” cuts across or interrogates those paradigms, specifically those of literary criticism and critical ethnic studies. The third and final section, “Desiring Subjects,” propels the “I” into
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motion: at times tense and halting, at times fluent in its unraveling. At once the subject who narrates and the object of narrative construction, autotheory’s “self” slips and slides. Although the reflexive prefix would etymologically appear to point to a self, in this section authors deliberate and interrogate the subject in question. The very “I” that seemed to have secured autotheory is here set in motion by performative undoing. Whether evacuated by digital mediation, surfaced by psychoanalysis, or deconstructed by its own articulation, the “I” uttered by desiring subjects unfolds in autotheory’s methodological wake.
In playful disavowal, Migueltzinta C. Solís’s “The Very Last Essay I Will Write about Ira Adelman: mestizXXX Autotheory, Pornographic Automethodologies, and Trans Autocinemas” opens the section by interrogating the effect of academic writing on trans self-imagining and Indigenous existence. This hybrid essay draws on two entwined archives: a relationship and amateur pornography both viewed and made; it further interrogates the definitional practices imposed upon Indigenous life from the embodied perspective of trans masculinities and queer desire. A series of failed connections, recognitions, and relations construct the writer at the sexually and racially charged intersections of self-location, what Solís calls mestizXXX methodology. By contrast, Damon Ross Young’s “need ideas!?!PLZ!!: The Phatic Self in the Always- On Network” illustrates how the vernacular genre of the vlog evacuates the body from autotheory. Instead, Young conceptualizes a phatic self, a self which no longer knows what to do apart from existing in a permanent relation to the network. This self, which imagines sociality and celebrity as its ends, is made in reiterative, linguistic output. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which the technological apparatuses of digital capitalism have impacted contemporary subjectivity. Autotheory is negated by a self that is the product of an algorithm. In inviting us to see where autotheory is not, Young’s essay illuminates its limits. In another approach to autotheory from its edges, Jamieson Webster, in “Nova Species Mihi—Hysterical Flora,” explores how the autotheoretical sprouts up, like a formal unconscious in the field formations of psychoanalysis. The eruption of something personal at the sites where analysis encounters the plant world fertilizes Webster’s rereading of major ideas in Freud, Ferenczi, and Lacan and offers autotheory as a hermeneutic. This chapter traces a history ostensibly
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concerned with the memories, dreams, and clinical moments of analystauthors encountering the vegetal world, a world that points to the possibility of interspecies relationality as an antidote for the sickness of being all-too-human.
In the final chapter, Judith Butler takes up the question of shared life with recourse to their own philosophical itinerary, and specifically through readings of Spinoza. At stake in their crescendoing “This Life, This Theory” is not only the question “how do I live,” but the social and political context of shared life, the ways we are acted upon as we act, which “forms us as subjects with the power to act collectively.” Although an “I” is opaque to itself—never fully self- crafted or self-knowing—the life of that “I” is nonetheless inextricable “from the social and environmental conditions of its persistence.” To raise the question of how to make an equitable and just world in common is to affirm our interdependency on it and on each other.
Finally, in a coda that we read as an implicit disavowal of Testo Junkie’s foundational performance of autotheory, Paul B. Preciado further pulls the rug out from under the “I” implied by autotheory. If Testo Junkie’s body- essay was the means of ethico-political resistance to late capitalist biopower, in this coda Preciado empties that self, claiming, “you are wrong to believe that I write about ‘myself’ when I say ‘I.’ I neither write about me, nor produce anything for me.” An empty self, detritus, the accumulated debris of late capitalist signification and colonial taxonomies, residues and remainders: a “junk” self. In contrast to the question “Isn’t my politics yours; my house, my body, yours?” with which Testo Junkie and a section of this introduction begin, Preciado’s coda ingests and regurgitates the very language of selfhood, reminding us that “self-theory can in no way be a clean business.”
S is for self-theory, for self, and also for slippage; for summoning a subject, still, and surfacing shared life. S, however, does not settle. In Barthes’s estimation, which opens this introduction, a discourse’s “figures cannot be classified: organized, hierarchized, arranged with a view to an end (a settlement): there are no first figures, no last figures.”52 We thus end where we began, with the alphabetic gesture which, in the arbitrariness of nomination and the excess of signification, proliferates definitions, and multiplies the very thing it describes. Autotheory’s alphabet
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asks that you add to its discursive play without settling for classification or bowing to ossification. If this volume ends with a field in formation, what it brings to light are the risks autotheory runs and the many possibilities it envisions. What results is neither a comprehensive portrait nor a stable archive, but rather a snapshot of a field in a moment of emergence. F is for futures.
NOTES
1. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 8.
2. This volume showcases literary instantiations of autotheory; however, recent scholarship has also understood the form as encompassing visual and performance arts. For readings of autotheory that spotlight visual cultures, see Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022); and Katherine Baxter and Cat Auburn, “Introduction for Special Issue ‘Autotheory in Contemporary Visual Arts Practice,’” Arts 12, no. 1 (2023): 11.
3. In the words of Carolyn Laubender, autotheory “composes a plural self as a gesture toward relational justice where self and other are seen as collaborative and cumulative, productive of a plurality” (55). For more, see “Speak for Your Self: Psychoanalysis, Autotheory, and the Plural Self,” Arizona Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2020): 39–64.
4. Arianne Zwartjes, “Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory,” Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 6, no. 1 (Fall 2019).
5. Though we echo the title of Max Cavitch’s “Everybody’s Autotheory,” where he curtails its zone of influence to autobiography’s intersubjective encounter with queer and feminist theory, this volume expands autotheory’s circle. Max Cavitch, “Everybody’s Autotheory,” Modern Language Quarterly 83, no. 1 (March 2022): 81–116.
6. For a reading of “intertextual kinship,” see Alex Brostoff’s “An Autotheory of Intertextual Kinship: Ambivalent Bodies in the Work of Maggie Nelson and Paul B. Preciado,” in “Dissident Self-Narratives: Radical and Queer Life Writing,” ed. Aude Haffen, special issue, Synthesis: An Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, no. 14 (2021): 91–115.
7. For an account of “skin/kin/kind,” see Vilashini Cooppan’s “Skin, Kin, Kind, I/you/we: Autotheory’s Compositional Grammar,” ASAP/Journal 6, no. 3 (2021): 583–605.
8. Alex Brostoff and Lauren Fournier, “Introduction: Autotheory ASAP! Academia, Decoloniality, and ‘I,’” ASAP/Journal 6, no. 3 (2021): 492.
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9. Brostoff and Fournier, “Introduction.”
10. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (1980): 55–56.
11. See, for example, Fournier’s monograph Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (2022), as well as the special issues of Arizona Quarterly (2020, edited by Robyn Wiegman), ASAP/Journal (2021, edited by Brostoff and Fournier), The American Book Review (2022, edited by Laura Cernat), Arts (2023, edited by Katherine Baxter and Cat Auburn), and Feminist Studies (2023, edited by Megan Sweeney and Judith Kegan Gardiner).
12. Kyle C. Frisina, “From Performativity to Performance: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Autotheory,” Arizona Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2020): 144.
13. Stacey Young, Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement (New York: Routledge, 1997).
14. Brostoff and Fournier, “Introduction.”
15. Brostoff’s monograph-in-progress, for example, situates autotheory as a hemispheric iteration of what they call “auto-relational writing,” which figures a writing subject bound to an intertextual collective of others. Their work reframes autotheory as a subset of a transnational turn toward marginalized modes of theorizing.
16. Ralph Clare’s “Becoming Autotheory,” on the other hand, situates autotheory as a genre that emerges in response to the institutionalization of critical theory, producing a historicity that brackets what constitutes autotheory by virtue of when. For more, see Clare, “Becoming Autotheory,” Arizona Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2020): 85–107.
17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 8.
18. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling
19. Robyn Wiegman, “Introduction: Autotheory Theory,” Arizona Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2020): 3.
20. See, for example, Fournier’s Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism; Arianne Zwartjes’s “Under the Skin” and “Autotheory as Rebellion: On Research, Embodiment, and Imagination in Creative Nonfiction,” Michigan Quarterly Review (2019); Stephanie D. Clare’s Nonbinary: A Feminist Autotheory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); and “Autotheory/Autoethnography,” special double issue, Feminist Studies 49, no. 2 (2023).
21. McKenzie Wark, “Critical (Auto) Theory,” e-flux Journal 140 (2023).
22. Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 11.
23. Wiegman, “Introduction: Autotheory Theory,” 7.
24. In this regard, our reading of autotheory as a relational form resonates with transdisciplinary extensions of Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself forthcoming
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25. For a reading of the fleshy materiality of affect, see Ania Chromik’s “Tender Fluid Machines,” A Journal of Queer Studies, no. 9 (2014): 239–253.
26. Jamieson Webster first raised this question in the 2018 ACLA seminar “The Rise of Autotheory Inside and Outside of the Academy.”
27. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 3; Preciado, Testo Junkie, 17.
28. Laura Cernat, “Introduction: Autofiction, Autotheory, and Regimes of Visibility,” American Book Review 43, no. 2 (2022): 9–17.
29. Tourmaline Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, “Known Unknowns: An Introduction to Trap Door,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, ed. Tourmaline Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), xv–xvii.
30. Within this genealogy, taken up in Young’s Changing the Wor(l)d (1997), are Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name—A Biomythography (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1982); and works by Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and others.
31. Rachel Lallouz, “Queer Intelligibility and Autotheory,” American Book Review 43, no. 2 (2022): 55.
32. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
33. Wiegman, “Introduction: Autotheory Theory.”
34. See, for example Young’s Changing the Wor(l)d (1997), Fournier’s Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (2022), and Zwartjes’s “Under the Skin.”
35. For a genealogy of autotheory through the lens of a Black poetics of the flesh, see Cooppan, “Skin, Kin, Kind, I/you/we.”
36. In “An Autotheory of Intertextual Kinship,” Brostoff argues that autotheory is a misnomer by virtue of the radical interdependency that this corpus both thematizes and formalizes through its intertextual praxis.
37. Paul B. Preciado, Testo yonqui (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2008), 23.
38. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 20.
39. Toni Morrison, Home (New York: Random House, 2012), 1.
40. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
41. We are thinking, for example, of readings of The Argonauts in which Nelson has been criticized for speaking for Harry Dodge. How, to echo Megan Sweeney’s formulation, to “avoid the pitfalls of conflating self and Other or erasing crucial
BROSTOFF AND VILASHINI COOPPAN in “Unaccountably Queer,” a special issue of differences (35, no. 3 [2024], guestedited by Teagan Bradway) marking the twentieth anniversary of the text.
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forms of incommensurability and difference”? See Arianne Zwartjes and Megan Sweeney, “The Contact Zone,” Feminist Studies 49, no. 2 (2023): 352–364.
42. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 231.
43. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 1.
44. We borrow this question from Toni Morrison’s Home, which figures as the epigraph of Erica Richardson’s chapter “‘I’ll Take You There’: Reading Autotheory Through Black Feminism.”
45. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 13.
46. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 7.
47. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 20.
48. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 9–10.
49. See, for example, Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism (New York: Norton, 2020).
50. Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 28, 85.
51. For an account of Preciado’s oeuvre and its transnational impacts, see Elliot Evans and Lili Owen Rowlands, “Introduction,” Paragraph 46, no. 1 (2023): 1–9.
52. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 8.
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