Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism by Lauren Fournier

Author:Lauren Fournier
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: autotheory; art writing; art criticism; feminism; fictocriticism; queer theory; intersectionality; decolonization; performativity; Indigenous art; aesthetics; political art; identity politics; contemporary art; art; literary theory; chris kraus; martha rosler; adrian piper; visual culture
Publisher: MIT Press

COMPARATIVE LIFE-READING: INTERTEXTUAL INTIMACY AND IDENTIFICATION

While the term “autotheory” foregrounds the “auto” (or autos, self), many works approach this self in relationship to others, theorizing relationships through autotheoretical modes. In 2018, during a three-part panel titled “The Rise of Autotheory Inside and Outside the Academy” on which I participated at the ACLA convention in Los Angeles, my colleague and friend Alex Brostoff thoughtfully described the sociality of autotheory in her paper “Toward an Autotheory of Intertextual Kinship.” In this paper, which focuses on The Argonauts and Testo Junkie, Brostoff makes the apt point that “autotheory” is, in fact, “a misnomer.”28 The autobiographical relation to theory that Nelson develops in The Argonauts is highly mediated through and dependent on the intersubjective, marked by the insistence of communication and intimacy, both with the figures in her life and with her theoretical forebears. The act of citing theory becomes a way to better understand one’s experience in the world and, at the same time, to provide insights gained from that experience into sexuality, politics, art, family, community, and other topics.

Through formal play, Nelson underscores the ways that her writing self—the narrator and the character “Maggie Nelson”—operates and writes in undeniable proximity to others. It doesn’t matter whether these are others with whom she is intimately involved as a lover or whom she “knows” through texts as a reader. Such transtextual relationships take place within, across, and beside other human beings, stories, and texts, and the writer cites each in turn.

We find this approach in earlier autotheoretical writings, such as Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In it, Anzaldúa writes “towards a new consciousness”—“la conciencia de la mestiza”—and cites Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos Calderón’s theory of “la raza cosmica” alongside her experience as a self-identified “mestiza” to elucidate this consciousness.29 Anzaldúa incorporates endnotes—typically used in academic work—into her creative-critical work to engender a space for queer, feminist, mestiza-becoming that engages citations as a reading list and a diverse intertextual undergirding for her personal-poetic-theoretical narrations. She finds philosophical and political allies in Calderón and others, such as Irena Klepfisz and Isabel Parra, next to whom she can write her autotheoretical invocation of “the Borderlands”—as land, as ontology, as consciousness, as epistemology, as relationship with an other, as multilingual translation and communication, as Indigenous becoming. While Nelson cites her lover, Dodge, in the margins of The Argonauts, Anzaldúa cites herself, framing chapter 4 of Borderlands, “Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone,” with one of her short poems as an epigraph; the name “Gloria Anzaldúa” is credited as the speaker, in an act of self-citation that becomes, effectively, an act of self-determination and self-respect. Anzaldúa takes space in her book to recognize her work as work and her poetry as poetry—a move that brings to mind “self-care,” in Lorde’s sense, according to which it is “an act of political warfare” for the marginalized—willful survival and self-assertion in spaces that have been hostile to them.30 In conceptualizing self-care, which might easily be co-opted by neoliberalism and capitalism, as a collective and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.