Autotheory

Autotheory is a literary tradition involving the combination of the narrative forms of autobiography, memoir, and critical theory. Works of autotheory involve a first-person account of an author’s life blended with research investigations. Works of autotheory might bring in broader questions in philosophy, literary theory, social structures, science and culture to interpret the politics and history within personal experiences.

Discussions surrounding Paul B. Preciado's 2013 book Testo Junkie popularized the term.

Lauren Fournier suggests autotheory is rooted in creative and critical practice in feminist contexts. Fournier describes autotheory as a site of resistance, where feminist writers, artists, and scholars brought political questions to bear in their own lives, in contrast to the situated distance between the writer and their subject matter or absence of the writer in their work that is prominent in academic research across disciplines. Clare suggests autotheory is adjacent to the literary movement autofiction, but distinct in that it is a direct response and form of resistance to the institutionalization of theory.

Notable works

 * Chanel Miller, Know My Name, 2019
 * Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, Duke University Press, 2020
 * Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University Press, 2017
 * Seo-Young Chu, "A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major," 2017
 * Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, 2015
 * Frank Wilderson III, Afropessimism, Liveright, 2020
 * Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
 * Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts, Duke University Press, 2008
 * Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, 2020
 * bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1994
 * Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, Semiotext(e), 1997
 * Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie, 2008
 * Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love, 1999
 * Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Haymarket Books, 2017
 * Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans, One World, 2021
 * Magda Cârneci, Fem, 2021
 * Ellen Samuels, "Six Ways of Looking At Crip Time," 2017
 * Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes, 2023
 * Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, 1980
 * Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not A Luxury," 1985
 * Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 1982
 * Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 1987
 * David Kishik, Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition, ICI Berlin Press, 2023
 * Arianne Zwartjes, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory," 2019