Autotheories

A transdisciplinary array of authors offering a new frame of reference for autotheory and its genre-bending synthesis of autobiography and critical theory.

Autotheories tells the story of a field in formation. Building on traditions that have long fused life writing, philosophical encounter, embodied theorizing, and cultural critique, autotheory constructs new practices of critical theory. Transgressing generic boundaries and bridging stylistic registers, it crafts language that is intimate, analytic, playful, and insurgent. Editors Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan underscore autotheory’s multiple genealogies and genre-bending forms while situating it within the contemporary political field. In this collection, autotheory emerges as a strut (of style), a straddle (of disciplines), a proliferation (of selves), an axis (of identifications), an index (of attachments), and an archive (of loves). 

An assemblage and an experience, Autotheories surveys the field’s iterations and permutations. Without settling for classification or bowing to ossification, Autotheories invites you to its discursive play.

Contributors include:

Alex Brostoff, Jessica Bush, Judith Butler, Vilashini Cooppan, Carla Freccero, rl Goldberg, Jan Grue, Emma Lieber, Megan Moodie, Lili Owen Rowlands, John Patterson, Paul B. Preciado, Erica Richardson, Migueltzinta C. Solís, Jamieson Webster, Damon Ross Young, Stacey Young, Arianne ZwartjesIntroduction: Articulating Autotheories
Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan
Part I: Body Disciplines
1 Impossible Professions: Autotheory, Psychoanalysis, Pedagogy
Emma Lieber, Jessica Bush, and John Patterson
2 That Obscure Object of Embodiment: On Autotheory’s Disciplinary Knowledges
Jan Grue
3 Autoethnography, Undone: Toward a Crip Critique of Ethnographic Realism
Megan Moodie
4 This Baby’s Got the Feel of a Girl: Trans Memoir, Autotheory, and Feeling as Oneself
RL Goldberg
Part II: Threshold Movements
5 The Auto- of Theory
Carla Freccero
6 Our Autotheoretical Lives
Stacey Young
7 “I’ll Take You There”: Reading Autotheory through Black Feminism
Erica Richardson
8 Failure Notes: Toward a Self-Praxis of Failure
Arianne Zwartjes
9 Begging to Differ: Autofiction, Autotheory and Contemporary French Feminisms
Lili Owen Rolands
Part III: Desiring Subjects
10 The Very Last Essay I Will Write about Ira Adelman: mestizXXX Autotheory, Pornographic Automethodologies, and Trans Autocinemas
Migueltzinta C. Solís
11 need ideas!?! PLZ!!: The Phatic Self in the Always-on Network
Damon Ross Young
12 Nova Species Mihi—Hysterical Flora
Jamieson Webster
13 This Life, This Theory
Judith Butler
Coda: Empty
Paul B. Preciado
Acknowledgments
Contributors"Theory wonks will love this rigorous and surprisingly playful survey of the genre of autotheory."
—The Millions“An indispensable addition to a growing field, this collection brings together a thrilling group of writers, thinkers, and practitioners to theorize the powerful, evolving concept of ‘autotheory’ that continues to grip so many of us.”
—Lauren Fournier, Executive Director, Pleasure Dome; author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism

“The essays gathered here deliver a ‘self’ that lives up to the complexity of contemporary theory and politics. This is the book on autotheory we have been waiting for.”
—Heather Love, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania; author of Underdogs: Queer Theory and Social DevianceAlex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they are the coeditor of a special issue of ASAP/Journal on autotheory.

Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing.