Compendium - Texts and Practices in Contemporary Trans and Queer Autotheory [Final Call]
CFP: On Trans and Queer Autotheory
- URL: https://cecomp.letras.ulisboa.pt/call-for-papers-detail.php?p=1169
- Call For Paper Type: SI
- H2 Index: 0
- Submission Date: 2025-12-15
Ethnic & Cultural Studies Feminism & Women's Studies Gender Studies Humanities, Literature & Arts (General) Literature & Writing English Language & Literature
Texts and Practices in Contemporary Trans and Queer Autotheory
Deadline for submission of original articles: 15 December 2025
Compendium – a Journal of Comparative Literature
Publication: June 2026
Guest editors:
Salomé Honório (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Lamiae Bouqentar (University of Toronto, Canada)
Synopsis:
This CFP seeks interdisciplinary contributions and comparative readings that contribute to and expand ongoing discussions around autotheory (or the autotheoretical) in works by trans and queer authors, critics and artists, across a wide range of media, genres, and disciplines, and especially so as they intersect with questions surrounding class, geopolitical belonging, institutional legitimacy, linguistic marginality, and/or diasporic experience.
What does autotheory look like when authored from the “underside” of capital and empire? How can literary forms resist the domestication or commodification of the self? When does autotheory become a method of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009), a practice of “wake work” (Sharpe, 2016), and a means of “fugitive thinking” (Moten and Harney, 2013)? And when does it in turn work towards reasserting its own set of incipient, normative frameworks, thus congealing a wider set of creative and critical possibilities?
We invite contributions that explore, theorize and critique autotheoretical forms across disciplinary, linguistic, and national boundaries.
Full call:
In recent years, autotheory has emerged as a potent literary and critical practice that fuses personal narrative with theoretical reflection, one that resists the conventions of academic discourse, while remaining deeply engaged with its stakes (Fournier, 2021). Autotheory both disrupts the implicit appeal to authenticity of more conventional modes of life writing (as codified by Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact”) and contests the presumably neutral, objective, and impersonal form of many modes of theoretical and critical production, emphasizing instead the articulation of partial perspectives and situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988).
For trans and queer writers, more specifically, autotheoretical practices have served as a method of self-inscription, challenging structural exclusions in theoretical and critical production. They have also become an active form of resistance, the complexities of which can be best understood from a comparative, interdisciplinary perspective: an appeal to embodied epistemologies which refutes disciplinary, generic, and ontological fixity, and puts into question normative structures of meaning-making and knowledge-production.
Writers such as Paul B. Preciado (Testo Junkie, 2008), Claudia Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric, 2014), Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts, 2015), Juliet Jacques (Trans: A Memoir, 2015), Christina Sharpe (In the Wake, 2016), Julietta Singh (No Archive Will Restore You, 2018) or McKenzie Wark (Reverse Cowgirl, 2020) have contributed to the popularization of autotheory in English-language literature and theory, and to its transnational consolidation as a privileged approach amidst trans, queer, and feminist writers and publics.
In such texts, personal experience does not merely supplement theoretical inquiry, but actively constitutes and shapes the writer’s epistemological orientation, just as theoretical frameworks reflexively reconfigure the articulation of personal experience. The corporeality of both the written text and the writing subject becomes a generative locus of hermeneutic inquiry – sites through which meaning, embodiment, and knowledge are interlaced and interrogated through form.
Yet as autotheory becomes increasingly institutionalized – taught, theorized, and celebrated as such –, its radical potentialities demand renewed scrutiny, especially through the lenses of race, class, gender, (anti-)coloniality, and the politics of language. Merve Emre (2017), for one, warns us against a potential slide into aestheticized selfhood, often removed from political urgency or structural critique, while Anna Kornbluh (2024) has characterized the recent popularity of autotheory as symptomatic of a wider privileging of immediacy as a paramount value of contemporary culture, in an apparent rejection of aesthetic and relational mediation.
Concurrently, a more genealogical approach to what has been dubbed as the autofictional (Ioanes, 2024) and/or the autotheoretical turn (Brostoff and Fournier, 2021) points to the necessity of conceptualizing autotheory in a more expansive fashion, as a modality or practice, rather than as a finite genre. Historicizing autotheory entails attending to the latent autotheoretical potentialities of texts and practices that would otherwise fall outside that purview – including more classical modes of autobiography and life writing; essays and experimental critical writing; confessional or diaristic registers; body and performance art, and works across a vast range of disciplinary formations. This leads us to an expansive archive of texts, practices, and modes of critical and creative action that might momentarily converge under the rubric of autotheory – but that can hardly be reduced to it.
A concomitant transnational emphasis helps place into relief the linguistic, cultural, and textual heterogeneity of practices that otherwise risk being reduced to a more recognizable set of processes of partial canonization and increased critical celebration – as exemplified by our own, tentative ‘state of the art’, and its explicit Anglo-centrism. Working through the structural exclusions present in contemporary discussions of autotheory, pivoted as they are to categories and projects in currency in the Global North, we recognize the importance of autotheoretical practices across a vast number of contexts, with their own troubled (or indifferent) relations to that category. These including major works by Argentine writer Camila Sosa Villada, Brazilian writer Amara Moira, or Moroccan-French writer and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa, to name but a few.
Moving beyond either a celebration or a rejection of the autotheoretical, we wonder instead about whose stories circulate, under which material conditions, and at what stakes. Indeed, the prevalence of privileged positions within contemporary autotheory (be it in terms of race, class, or institutional affiliation) calls for a deeper interrogation of the complex geographies of access, recognition, and translation at work within contemporary autotheory, as usually defined and discussed in the west.
Likewise, the more generic definition of any given text as “autotheoretical” proves insufficient, if it is not followed by a subtending analysis of its formal dynamics, compositional strategies, and particular ways (aesthetic as well as conceptual) of mediating the unsteady divides between creative praxis, theoretical production, and life.
This CFP seeks interdisciplinary contributions and comparative readings that contribute to and expand ongoing discussions around autotheory (or the autotheoretical) in works by trans and queer authors, critics and artists, across a wide range of media, genres, and disciplines, and especially so as they intersect with questions surrounding class, geopolitical belonging, institutional legitimacy, linguistic marginality, and/or diasporic experience.
What does autotheory look like when authored from the “underside” of capital and empire? How can literary forms resist the domestication or commodification of the self? When does autotheory become a method of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009), a practice of “wake work” (Sharpe, 2016), and a means of “fugitive thinking” (Moten and Harney, 2013)? And when does it in turn work towards reasserting its own set of incipient, normative frameworks, thus congealing a wider set of creative and critical possibilities?
We invite contributions that explore, theorize and critique autotheoretical forms across disciplinary, linguistic, and national boundaries.
Topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Intermedial/interdisciplinary practices in comparison: the autotheoretical across arts, media, and contexts.
- Making the text/making the self: self-reflexivity, and the linguistic and textual politics of writing the “self”.
- Language, translation, and epistemic power: problems of access, circulation, and dissemination.
- Positionality and privilege in perspective: theorizing the material conditions of production of autotheoretical texts and practices.
- Intersectionality, positionality, and embodiment: class, race, gender, indigeneity, disability, queerness, transness, and/or (anti)coloniality in autotheoretical practice.
- Institutionalization and legitimation: autotheory as an incipient tradition?
- Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives: non-western and/or diasporic engagements with autotheory, beyond or despite its hegemonic, Eurocentric histories.
- Politics of witnessing, silence, and refusal in minoritarian life-writing: claims to representation, refusals of interpretation, and other tactics of writerly opacity.
- English-language CFP (PDF)
- French-language CFP (PDF)
- Portuguese-language CFP (Website)
Submission Guidelines:
Submitted articles may be written in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French, and should range between 6,000 and 8,000 words, including notes, references, an abstract of 200 to 250 words, as well as 4 to 6 keywords.
Authors must follow the formatting guidelines listed in the Submissions section under Author Guidelines on the journal’s website. Submissions must include a separate document containing a short biographical note of the author of about 100 words, and their ORCiD number.
Online submission: to register and submit your full article for peer review, please follow the hyperlink Make a Submission on our homepage by December 15, 2025.
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