Conference Programme

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

THINKING THROUGH SELF, BODY & PRACTICE

HELLO CONFERENCE PROGRAMME AND INFO PACK

Wednesday 26th October - Online only

Thursday 27th October - University of Glasgow + Online

Friday 28th October - Tramway Arts Venue, Glasgow

WELCOME

The conference organisers would like to welcome you to Autotheory: Thinking Through Self, Body and Practice: a three-day online and in-person exploration of the possibilities and potential of working, thinking and creating autotheoretically. Held across the University of Glasgow and Tramway, an arts venue in Glasgow, the event brings together artists, writers, performers, activists, and theorists from across disciplines, locations and backgrounds and aims to build connection, understanding and excitement for an emerging mode of ‘doing theory’.

‘Autotheory’ describes a mode of thinking that blends self-representation and philosophical or theoretical engagement within and across disciplines, including literature, film, art, music, and academic work. It is a genre-defying practice with deep roots in the work of Women of Colour, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+ and workingclass feminists who sought to speak back to the academy and its hegemonic modes of knowledge production through creative and bodily practices. The term is both nebulous and porous, open to multiple iterations, manifestations and conceptions, but it is grounded, always, in a feminist ethics of the personal is political and the personal is theoretical.

Over three days, we aim to explore autotheory across practices, mediums, disciplines, places and times, paying particular attention to the radical possibilities of autotheoretical work. Thinking happens everywhere, and so too, does autotheory. On days two and three, along with a range of insightful panels, we are excited to include a number of performances and workshops that challenge traditional conceptions of where and how theoretical work is done and which foster a practice of thinking through one’s body and experiences.

Day one will take place online only and will feature our Key Note address by Dr Lauren Fournier, author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice (2021). Day two will take place at the University of Glasgow and will be streamed online, featuring a plenary session with Professor Jane Gallop, author of Anecdotal Theory (2002). The final day of the conference takes place outside of the academy and welcomes both researchers and members of the public.

We see this event as taking part in a process of expanding definitions, breaking boundaries, and building inter- and transdisciplinary alliances. We hope you’ll join us in this vital work.

KEYNOTE

The organising committee are delighted to welcome Dr Lauren Fournier as the keynote speaker at 'Autotheory: Thinking through Self, Body and Practice' Dr Fournier has been at the forefront of autotheory scholarship, completing her doctoral dissertation on autotheory and publishing the first monograph on the topic in 2021, and so we could not think of a better person to provide a keynote for our conference We invite all conference delegates to join us online to hear Dr Fournier's insights and learn more about her work. With special thanks to Dr Fournier for joining us.

Dr Lauren Fournier

Lauren Gabrielle Fournier (she/her) is a writer and researcher working at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and humanities. A first-generation student and scholar, her writing and teaching cohere around hybrid and multi-genre writing as practices of storytelling and philosophical inquiry She holds a PhD in English Literature and completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. Her debut monograph Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (The MIT Press, 2021) is the first book-length study of 'autotheory,' which historicizes the English-language term in light of longer, intersectional, and transmedial feminist art histories As a curator, she has organized exhibitions and screenings of contemporary art and film at such venues as the

Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, the Medical Museion in Copenhagen, and the Horse Hospital in London. She is the founder of the ongoing, site-responsive project

Fermenting Feminism, which bridges eco-aesthetics and the life sciences. Her debut novella The Barista Boys is forthcoming through Fiction Advocate (San Francisco, 2022), and commingles autofiction, literary criticism, and place-based/siteresponsive writing.

Photograph by Sarah Bodri, copyright Sarah Bodri Studio, 2022.

Anecdotal Theory and Autotheory

Professor Jane Gallop

Please join us for a plenary session in which we welcome Professor Jane Gallop to the University of Glasgow. Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and has written extensively on ‘anecdotal theory’, a practice that shares much crossover with contemporary autotheory.

Jane Gallop has been teaching feminist theory, literary theory, & queer theory for nearly 50 years. She has published over a hundred articles and 10 books. 4 of those books are what we would now call AutoTheory, though at the time she dubbed them Anecdotal Theory. Those 4 are: Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997), Anecdotal Theory (2002), Living With His Camera (2003), and Sexuality, Disability, & Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus (2019).

In her Plenary Talk, Professor Gallop will consider both autotheory and anecdotal theory, their relations, resonances, parallels, and differences Please join us for what will no doubt be an unmissable discussion.

COLLABORATIONWITH GLASGOWWOMEN'SLIBRARY

We invite all speakers and conference participants to get involved with a special collaboration with Glasgow Women's Library. Glasgow Women's Library (GWL) is one of the city's gems, home to a lending library and several archives, including LGBTQIA+ artefacts and a collection of zines, as well as offering an accessible and welcoming space for reading, events and workshops. The collaboration aims to increase recognition and readership of autotheory in the community and we have two exciting projects for you to take part in.

AUTOTHEORY CURATION

The conference organisers will produce a curated display of autotheoretical texts from the GWL collection in order to draw readers' attention to this mode of writing and to key feminist autotheoretical texts The curation will be on display throughout the month of October and we encourage participants to visit Glasgow Women's Library to see the display and, of course, to explore the library too Share photos of your visit with the #autotheoryatGWL

DONATE A BOOK

We invite delegates to donate a book which they consider as autotheory to the lending library at GWL. If you would like to donate a book, please complete the form below to tell us which book you would like to donate. We will then liaise with GWL to ensure they can accept your chosen book and we'll be in touch to arrange your donation. You will be able to either post your donation or bring it to with you to the conference and we will pass it onto the library Please note that we cannot cover postage or any other costs associated with a donation and ask that you kindly cover these

THE SCHEDULE

Keynote: Dr Lauren Fournier

Workshop: DIY TheoryAutotheoretical Zine-Making

VENUE: ONLINE

WEDNESDAY26TH OCTOBER

10.00-11.30

ONLINE PANEL 1: BODY THOUGHTS

Jakob Summerer Autotheorising Eating Disorders: Metaphors and Autopathographical Counter-Narrative

Abhisek Pal

"God Is My Asshole": Theorising the Gay Male Body in Gustave Vinagre and Rodrigo Carneiro's The Blue Flower of Novalis

11 30-13 00 BREAK

13 00-14 30

ONLINE PANEL 2: LOCATING AUTOTHEORY

Brit Schulte The Perzine as Autotheory in (Art) Practice

Marjana Krajac Bridges, Sequences, Peel-offs: Equipment of the Body’s Reasoning

14.30-15.00 BREAK

15.00-16.30

KEYNOTE ADDRESS - DR LAUREN FOURNIER

THURSDAY27TH OCTOBER

08:30 REGISTRATION OPENS

09 00-10 15 PANEL A: AUTOTHEORETICAL COLLABORATIONS

Grace Borland Sinclair & Christine Borland

Mindy Ptolomey, India Boxall, Dan Perry, Michael Malt-Cullen, Lisa Bradley

The Distaff Dialogues: Speculative Storytelling Across Generations

Untamed Selves for Plural Publics: Exploring the Political (Im)Possibilities of Collective Autotheory within the Social Sciences

Ella Berny Beyond Autotheory Towards a Collaborative Theorising

10.15-10.45 BREAK

10.45-12.00 PERFORMANCE PANEL 1: OBJECT ENCOUNTERS

Adam Denton auto-parts: Performance Vehicles with SW1ne-Hunter

Goda Palekaitė Film Screening: I Write While Disappearing

12 00-12 45 LUNCH BREAK

VENUE: SENATE ROOM, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW + STREAMED ONLINE

12:45-13:45

PLENARY TALK: PROFESSOR JANE GALLOP ANECDOTAL THEORY AND AUTOTHEORY

13:45-14:00

COMFORT BREAK

14 00-15 30

Hannah Spruce and Angie Lee

PANEL B: WORKING AUTOTHEORY

The Reading Group as Autotheoretical Practice

Lauren Bunce 'A Factory of Emotions': Affective Labor and Autotheoretical Practice

Cat Auburn

Risky Palimpsests: Plural-Authorship in an Autotheoretical Art Practice

15 30-16 00

COMFORT BREAK

16:00-18.00 WORKSHOP

Lesley Guy, Grace

Denton, Cat Auburn Processing Theory with our Hands

18 30-20 00

CONFERENCE DINNER, THE GROSVENOR CAFE

FRIDAY28TH OCTOBER

09 30-11 00

PANEL C: FEMINIST REDUX

Sponsored by Contemporary Women's Writing Association (CWWA)

Inés García

Citation Politics and Feminist Bricks in Dionne Brand’s Autotheoretical Novel Theory

Xenia Mura Fink

Self-Representation, the Gaze, Desire, and the Female Artist: A Personal Case Study

Emily Moeck [sic]: Archiveology as a Feminist Theory of Narrative in Practice

Isabella Shields

11 00-11 15

Refracting Queer Trauma: Autotheory as Haunted Mansion in Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House

BREAK

11 15-12 45

Jeana Moody

PANEL D: THEORY INCARNATE

Homebody, or at Home in This Body: A Chronically Ill and Queer Narrative

Judith Schreier

'The Size of My Body Is A Simple Fact': Autotheorical Approaches in Fat Life Writing

Rebecca Mackenzie

Swimming with Submarines: Violence and Becoming on the Clyde

Maria Gil Ulldemolins

Autotheory for Mountains: Land(e)scaping the First-Person Voice

12.45-13.30

LUNCH BREAK

VENUE: TRAMWAY, GLASGOW

13 30-15 15

PERFORMANCE PANEL 2: MOUTHING AUTOTHEORY

Lesley Guy LG and RCP Continued in Fragments

Rachel Lyon Imitatio as Method: Becoming Catherine of Siena's Voice

Nerea Bello Sagarzazu Txalaparta, Elkarhizketa/Txalaparta: A dialogue

Samantha Talbot The Space Junk Manifesto

15 15-15 45

BREAK

15 45-17 30

WORKSHOP

Lauren Cooper DIY Theory: Autotheoretical Zine Making

THEVENUES

The conference is hybrid and will take place both online and inperson. Day 1 will be held entirely online. Speakers presenting on Day 2 or Day 3 will need to travel to Glasgow. Please note that there are two in-person venues for the conference and that you should make arrangements to travel to each venue accordingly.

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

Senate Room, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ

Thursday 27 October

TRAMWAY

25 Albert Drive, Glasgow, G41 2PE

Friday 28 October

ABSTRACTS

IN ORDER OF SCHEDULED APPEARANCE

BODYTHOUGHTS

This presentation will briefly explain my article 'Homebody, or at home in this body' rejected from publication because of its inclusion of autotheory. In using my personal narrative as a queer and chronically ill femmeboi woman, I illustrate the ways heteronormative, normatively-abled society can create borders of belonging, and meditate on ideas of body as home and what being a homebody can mean Using words from Sara Ahmed, Alison Kafer, Eli Clare and Leah Lakshmi PiepznaSamarasinha, I interrogate the connection between feminist autotheory or autoethnography as a legitimate form of research and claiming disabled, queer and chronic illness labels. The way societal structures of normalcy can shape bodies happens on a deeply personal level, and the difference is felt through the capacity of feeling at home both within society and within your own body. Only through ourselves and our bodies can we shape theory

JAKOB SUMMERER AUTOTHEORISING EATING DISORDERS: METAPHORS AND AUTOPATHOGRAPHICAL COUNTER-NARRATIVE

Firmly embedded in the feminist discourse of the 1980s and 90s, Marya Hornbacher’s memoir Wasted (1998) is autotheory par excellence. In writing her lived experience of bulimia and anorexia, she positions herself vis-à-vis a variety of philosophical, psychiatric, and literary discourses. She then weaves these discourses into a complex, intertextual matrix, with her sick body and mind at the centre. This paper argues that Hornbacher specifically relies on metaphorical language to counter dominant philosophical and psychiatric discourses. Metaphors allow her to open windows onto the mind of her past self and encourage readers to re-conceptualise the aetiology and phenomenology of eating disorders. In constructing this counteraetiology, she resists the dominant focus on personal psychopathology, never allowing her readers to lose sight of the fact 'that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick' (Hedva, 2020: 9) – in other words, that eating disorders are culturally inflected syndromes.

JEANA MOODY HOMEBODY, OR AT HOME IN THIS BODY: A CHRONICALLY ILL AND QUEER NARRATIVE

Chaired by Dženana Vucic, PhD Researcher in English Literature, University of Glasgow

ABHISEK PAL

'GOD IS MY ASSHOLE': THEORISING THE GAY MALE BODY IN GUSTAVE VINAGRE AND RODRIGO CARNEIRO'S 'THE BLUE FLOWER OF NOVALIS'

This paper traces autotheory vis-à-vis the gay male body with a focus on cultural signification of the anus through a reading of The Blue Flower of Novalis, a 2019 Brazilian docudrama by Gustavo Vinagre and Rodrigo Carneiro. In his apartment in São Paulo, poet Marcelo Diorio philosophises about his HIV-positive body and the correlation between queerness and the anus which has impacted his kinships, creativity and worldview. This paper argues that the queer narrator's utterances as well as the visual style/technique of the film critique what Lee Edelman terms 'reproductive futurism' Capitalist heteropatriarchy has historically viewed the gay man's anus as the source of decadence, disease, death and abject wastefulness as opposed to the vagina's procreative connotations. By reclaiming the anus as the locus of habitual pleasure, by exploring the erotic in the thanatotic, the text proposes an alternative theory of what it means to desire, create, live and die.

WEDNESDAY 26TH OCTOBER

13.00-15.30 - ONLINE

LOCATINGAUTOTHEORY

MARJANA KRAJAC BRIDGES, SEQUENCES, PEEL-OFFS: EQUIPMENT OF THE BODY'S REASONING

My suggestion in this paper is that the body belongs to multispectral equipment and is intelligible only with environments that it moves and equips. In Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Heidegger suggests that “the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge.” In other words, there is truly nothing there prior to the body emerging to itself as constitutive of equipment of the bridge that then equips the process of the body in return. My aim is to illuminate the argument from several perspectives while exploring its choreo-theoretic potential.

TANIA ROMERO MAPPING THE SELF: AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHIES FROM THE INBETWEEN

'Mapping The Self: Auto-ethnographies from the in-between' will explore the challenges of immigrant auto-ethnographies that flourish in the cultural, geopolitical, and socio-economic gaps. This decolonizing space of in-betweeness in flux, produces a series of theoretical methodologies that maintains a flow of contrasting, complimentary, and new identities. How does one map and document a displaced self? And with so many moving parts, how does one become a productive and effective art-ivist in movement?

Chaired by Dženana Vucic, PhD Researcher in English Literature, University of Glasgow

BRIT SCHULTE THE PERZINE AS AUTOTHEORY IN (ART) PRACTICE

The perzine (personal zine) is an exemplary autotheoretical object Zine making, as a practice existing outside of mainstream or institutionally supported publication, is rooted in self-representation (and self-determination) and demonstrates how an art practice can blend theoretical and philosophical experiments. Zines are free or cheap to circulate, open to anonymity and obscurity, and exist outside of traditional criticism or surveillance. Zines are art objects, theory-making devices, and asterisms which create potential within ourselves and broader communities to navigate that which is before/after us My presentation comprises an autotheoretical work “Revolutionary Scorned: A Perzine About Surviving” as well as the emotional labor and physical making of this perzine and others, while situating the zine as an exemplar of autotheoretical practice. I’ll be re-membering (stitching and forming) my memories, body trauma, organizing history, and survivorship through the container of the perzine as both exorcism and aesthetic object (collage, photo assemblage, written text).

AUTOTHEORETICAL COLLABORATIONS

This work of plural authorship records artist Christine Borland’s first experience of the ancient practice of flax growing, in dialogue with a speculative evocation authored by daughter Grace Borland Sinclair, depicting a future in which intimate knowledge of plant cultivation and husbandry has been all but lost. At home together over the pandemic, they enacted the shared seasonal rituals, which would have sustained both society and environment before the modern scientific and industrial era displaced women as growers, healers and makers of cloth.

This experimental presentation will take the performative form of reading together, accompanied by a moving image digital avatar who embodies movements described in the text. While acknowledging inherent tensions, we enact 'collective thinking and movement in complexity' (Haraway D, 2016) to explore matrilineal and alternative forms of generating and archiving knowledge

In the so-called writing differently movement, critical scholars of Management and Organization Studies have explored new ways of writing, to re-imagine what constitutes legitimate knowledge in the academy. Writing the self has become a central feature of these texts. For the two of us – one a literary scholar, one a management and organisation studies scholar –‘writing differently’ provides fertile ground for reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of theorizing from the self. In particular, we are intrigued by the recurring notion of vulnerability in the texts we have read. In this meditation we will begin with a contemplative reading of Butler’s discussion of vulnerability in The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) to situate ourselves and the audience in the thought-feeling of vulnerability. We will use this as a jumping in point from which to explore what the potential of autotheory for the writing differently movement might be

GRACE BORLAND SINCLAIR & CHRISTINE BORLAND THE DISTAFF DIALOGUES: SPECULATIVE STORYTELLING ACROSS GENERATIONS

MARJANA JOHANSSON & MRINALINI GREEDHARRY WRITING DIFFERENTLY: VULNERABILITY AND THEORIZING FROM THE SELF

AUTOTHEORETICAL COLLABORATIONS: THURSDAY 27TH OCTOBER

09.00-10.15 - SENATE ROOM, UNIV. OF GLASGOW

UNTAMED SELVES FOR PLURAL PUBLICS: EXPLORING THE POLITICAL (IM)POSSIBILITIES OF COLLECTIVE AUTOTHEORY WITHIN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Mindy Ptolomey, India Boxall, Dan Perry, Michael Malt-Cullen, Lisa Bradley

Feminist and anti-colonial critiques of contemporary academia recognise the ways in which hegemonic knowledge-making practices limit researchers’ abilities to read, think and imagine otherwise. Such acts of epistemic violence extend outward to broader publics, for whom ‘impactful’ research seeks to speak to, for and attend; all the while taming the “wild profusion of existing things” (Foucault, 1970: xv; and see Lather, 2006). This paper/performance offers reflections on the politics and (im)possibilities of autotheory for social science researchers and their wider publics, as explored through the collective endeavour of zine-making. Unfolding from shared disciplinary experiences in education, as well as distinct disciplinary backgrounds, intersectional identities, non-academic her/istories and institutional positionalities, our co-created zine (which will be made available to conference delegates in advance) shares our experiences and reflections, as well as provokes further discussion over the issues and challenges of thinking and doing research autotheoretically in the social sciences and beyond.

OBJECTENCOUNTERS

This piece shares the story of a hand embroidered, auto-biographical patchwork quilt made to accompany my written doctoral thesis on time and knowledge. Created in order to unsettle hegemonic temporalities and epistemes perpetuated through traditional academic texts, the story unfolds across three parts, with the quilt itself punctuating the narrative. The first part focuses on my journey to the quilt and the ways in which the medium (quilt) and practice (quilt-making) emerged in dialogue with my supposed ‘non-academic’ identities and everyday practices of walking, showering, crocheting and sewing The second part reflects on the fittingness of the quilt form, from the vantage of academic texts, non-academic writings, and her/istories and contemporary movements which elevate quilts and quilt-making as radical, subversive and collective knowledge-acts. The final part explores how the process of storying the quilt in dialogue with others reveals its potential for crafting time and knowledge differently, for different audiences.

auto-parts deploys a method that is an attempt. An attempt to be the (en)countermeasure of the unforeseeable, in its own production. Through a live, essaying approach that is foundational and fluid, auto-parts are delivered in broken and sutured forms, re-positing situated and captured live action: aiming towards the generative and mutating. Drawing on noise making practices, both locational and itinerant, the ‘touring artist’ is cast as (re)searcher at large, engaging with the problematics this self-casting comprises. They’ll trust the search, the open-ended, suddenly upended, careering off the road: encounters lead to intra-conurbational movement, underset by being(s), on and of the move… and who can move?

who can’t?

who’s missing?

The parked car leaks heavy metals into the pavement.

ADAM DENTON

AUTO-PARTS: PERFORMANCE VEHICLES WITH SW1NEHUNTER

LISA BRADLEY THESIS AS TEXT/ILE FOR THINKING, WRITING AND REIMAGINING TIME AND KNOWLEDGE

THURSDAY 27TH OCTOBER 10.45-12.00 - SENATE ROOM, UNIV. OF G

Chaired by Serena Wong, PhD Researcher in English Literature, University of Glasgow

OBJECT ENCOUNTERS (PERFORMANCES): THURSDAY 27TH OCTOBER

10.45-12.00 - SENATE ROOM, UNIV. OF GLASGOW

Palekaitė's 'I Write While Disappearing' (17 min, 2021) is an experimental short film based on found television interviews, which serve in creating a fictional discussion between the author and 14 female writers. An homage to them and an attempt to retroactively trace her own intellectual lineage as a female artist and writer. French feminists (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva) converse with a Brazilian mystic (Clarice Lispector), an Austrian dramatist (Elfriede Jelinek), a SovietLithuanian romantic (Salomėja Nėris), and others; meanwhile, the artist’s own voice pierces through: “If I steal does it mean that I write?” It can be viewed in relation to Palekaitė’s ongoing artistic research and practice: revealing the liminal space of the psyche, she invites viewers to intimately encounter historical and discursive characters, and creates counter-narratives to established discourses of truth. The film was first presented at Kunsthal Gent in Ghent and Editorial, Vilnius in Palekaitė’s solo exhibition 'The Strongest Muscle in the Human Body is the Tongue' (2021).

GODA PALEKAITE FILM SCREENING: I WRITE WHILE DISAPPEARING

THURSDAY 27TH OCTOBER

14.00-15.30 - SENATE ROOM, UNIV. OF G

WORKINGAUTOTHEORY

HANNAH SPRUCE & ANGIE LEE THE READING GROUP AS AUTOTHEORETICAL PRACTICE

Lee and Spruce discuss how the reading group might be understood as an autotheoretical practice. They suggest that the book club is a space of living theory in which people, often women, meet to use theory to deepen a political consciousness, unlearn internalised sexism, racism, classism, ableism and develop a praxis for everyday life Following a discussion of the autotheoretical dimensions of the book club, Lee and Spruce examine survey responses from book club participants on their experience of being in a reading group. The survey aims to examine how book club participation, as Elizabeth Long argues, might be conceived as ‘creative cultural work’ that enables individuals ‘to articulate or even discover who they are: their values, their aspirations, and their stance toward the dilemmas of their worlds’ (2003, 145). Following Long, we employ creative methods to test whether reading groups enhance, transform, and shape participant’s identities and values

ELLA BERNY BEYOND AUTOTHEORY TOWARDS A COLLABORATIVE THEORISING: ABORTION STORYTELLING AND POLYVOCAL POSSIBILITIES

This will be a space to explore how we can borrow from the mechanisms of autotheory to imagine (im?)possibilities for an arts-based practice of polyvocal theorising, whilst interrogating the tensions between an inevitable self in collaborative work. The paper will draw on my PhD project, which looks at abortion storytelling as a site of everyday feminist practice, and the possibilities that polyvocal storytelling might open for contesting abortion regimes. We will contemplate silences, storytelling and polyvocality

Chaired by Samantha Talbot, PhD Researcher in Music, University of Glasgow

WORKING AUTOTHEORY: THURSDAY 27TH OCTOBER

14.00-15.30 - SENATE ROOM, UNIV. OF GLASGOW

How does autotheory operate alongside, or through, affective labor, a term used to categorize a broad range of exchanges that require the management of feeling? How does affective labor function as a source of intimacy and knowledge for those involved in its performance? This presentation confronts a broader issue about the illegibility of labor by exploring what, exactly, autotheory can make visible By reading Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) alongside one another, my aim is to question the extent to which affective labor reveals something unique about autotheorical practice (and vice versa). This presentation will also reflect on the forms of labor that autotheoretical texts demand from their audience.

CAT AUBURN RISKY PALIMPSESTS: PLURAL-AUTHORSHIP IN AN AUTOTHEORETICAL ART PRACTICE

Carolyn Laubender suggests that ‘speaking with others’ in autotheory can be understood as a ‘plural self’, and that there are both incentives and risks to working in this way. This paper explores these tensions and contradictions of autotheoretical plural-authorship, as encountered through my artistic practice-based research with the memoir of an Anzac WW1 veteran. This research has been undertaken through embodied artistic engagement with key theoretical texts and of course, the memoir itself. It is part of a wider exploration into the way that authorship and ownership of narrative transforms as narratives oscillate between collective and private memory

Importantly, this paper is focused through the lens of my art practice. It introduces alternative forms of knowledge production through autotheoretical modes of embodied sculpture and film practices. Endurance sculpture, swimming, selfrecording, and reflective filmmaking all feature as forms of ‘speaking with’ and close readings.

LAUREN BUNCE 'A FACTORY OF EMOTIONS': AFFECTIVE LABOR AND AUTOTHEORETICAL PRACTICE

THURSDAY 27TH OCTOBER

16.00-18.00 - SENATE ROOM, UNIV. OF G

WORKSHOP1

We invite colleagues to join us in an experimental workshop that will enable a range of ways we can think through our hands and embody theory in new and unexpected ways. This is an opportunity for researchers to develop an autotheoretical toolkit and explore inverting the power dynamics of Theory through creative practice within a safe group environment.

We are inspired by the simple idea put forward by Monica Pearl that autotheory 'deconstructs the generic conventions of memoir and academic prose but remakes them as well' [1] We want to create a workshop that allows us to ask as a collective the question: ‘what new ideas can we create through the practice-based deconstruction of theory’? We are excited to process new ideas together as a group as this can help to balance out the introspective aspects of working autotheoretically.

We will focus on the following processes through making and discussion:

· Freewriting

· Guided meditation

· Reworking an existing piece of text through haptic and craft-based methods

· Collaboration and the practice of ‘thinking-with’ or together

Materials: Participants are to bring along a photocopy of a section of theory to work with. We will bring a selection of printed texts, but this may work best with material chosen by the attendee

We will build acknowledgements of the lineages from which we draw our ideas and techniques into this workshop, which are refined from a plethora of sources, including those developed from our own practices. We will include consideration of accessibility into the workshop. We would like to plan a 2-3 hour session but will be open to negotiating this with the organisers. We are also open to the possibility of using the workshop content to reflect back to the rest of the conference

[1] Pearl paraphrased in Wiegman, Robyn “In the Margins with The Argonauts ” Angelaki 23 1 (2018): 210

LESLIE GUY, GRACE DENTON & CAT AUBURN PROCESSING THEORY WITH OUR HANDS

FRIDAY 28TH OCTOBER

09.30-11.00 - TRAMWAY

FEMINISTREDUX

INES GARCIA CITATION POLITICS AND FEMINIST BRICKS IN DIONNE BRAND'S AUTOTHEORETICAL NOVEL THEORY

This paper reads citation politics as autotheoretical gestures in Canadian writer Dionne Brand’s latest novel Theory (2018). Featuring a Black, lesbian academic narrator in the flesh of ‘Teoria’, this novel challenges prevalent assumptions regarding the difference between fictional and theoretical discourses Brand’s citational practice as footnotes in the novel equates her narrator with renowned Black studies and feminist theorists like Christina Sharpe and Leslie Sanders. This practice echoes Sarah Ahmed’s determination that citations can be ‘feminist bricks’ that counteract the white, male genealogy that has legitimised academic research. Brand’s citational practice in this novel fully inserts her in the autotheoretical arena, in which ‘personal experience informs the writers’ understanding of theory, which recursively informs the personal experience’ (Carmody, 2021) It also legitimises the novel’s theoretical impulses by allowing Teoria to examine her constitution as a Black subject in different social spaces (e.g., her sexual-affective relationships and academia).

XENIA MURA FINK SELF-REPRESENTATION, THE GAZE, DESIRE, AND THE FEMALE ARTIST: A PERSONAL CASE STUDY

Deploying my drawing practice, this visual and performative presentation outlines arguments for a critique of objectification as a commonplace and unquestioned strategy within female and feminist self-representation. As an artist who creates images while analysing critically the ones surrounding her, I find myself in a double bind, facing the hegemonic neoliberal emphasis on the agency of the individual. The idea that any form of self-expression can be interpreted as a means of personal empowerment has permeated feminisms of the 21st century, complicating a criticism of this imaging in the artistic realm. I interweave theoretical and autobiographical explorations to query our desire for the image and our aspiration for visual pleasure, looking at everyday life, popular culture, and contemporary art.

Chaired by Professor Alexandra Shepard, Professor of Gender History, University of Glasgow

FEMINIST REDUX: FRIDAY 27TH OCTOBER 09.30-11.00 - TRAMWAY

EMILY MOECK [SIC]:ARCHIVEOLOGY AS A FEMINIST THEORY OF NARRATIVE IN PRACTICE

If we understand the project of historical archives as (re)composing the narrative of white hegemony, can we subvert this practice without, paradoxically, reinscribing hegemonic time? Building upon Catherine Russell’s ‘archiveology’ and Giulia Battaglia’s concept of an ‘anarchive’ that reactivates archival forms into collaborative spaces, I argue we must create a new way to engage with the archive that is nonlinear and dialectic that composes itself from within and outside of historic/hegemonic time where the affect prompted by the associative personal and historical memories of the reader/spectator co-compose the work of pastness. After theorizing these future narrative constructions, I’ll present a sample from my own ‘anarchive’ work-in-progress concerning American masculinity through the personal lens of being the granddaughter of John Wayne’s agent: [sic] interweaves archeological history, film criticism, and memoir as a means of engaging in a complex narratological dialogue with the American frontier narrative on topics of historiography, cultural memory, and heritage.

ISABELLA SHIELDS AUTOTHEORY AS HAUNTED MANSION IN CARMEN MARIA MACHADO'S 'IN THE DREAM HOUSE'

As a chapter of my PhD on ethical representation and the praxis of identification in autotheory, this paper explores how Machado approaches autotheory as a traumatised and shifting form. Using tropes from memoir, fairy tales, and horror films to footnote and index experiences of abuse, Machado interrogates what nuanced and negative representation means for queer people, finding an archive to refract traumatic experiences through to investigate self-perception and self-representation. As a bisexual Latin American woman in America, Machado explores cultural alienation and how it affected her self-perception and expectations of how she should be treated, examining instructive culturally received ideals and navigating her sociosexual relationship to them. In this undertaking Machado has developed a vulnerable, care-informed work that queers the forms she refers to as a means of instating a literary and cinematic history which recognises and responds to bodily and emotional unsafety with speculative frameworks to negotiate that recognition.

FRIDAY 28TH OCTOBER

11.15-12.45 - TRAMWAY

THEORYINCARNATE

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About

Fat (2020) by well-known fat activist Aubrey Gordon is a provoking example of fat life writing. The US-American mediascape experienced a wave of publications of first-person narratives by people who write about their experience of embodying a fat body that no longer fit the frame of weight loss narratives Gordon’s publication adopts a distinct and creative mixture of genre-bending patterns. Gordon's narrative incorporates feminist autobiographical, historical, and journalistic delineations and (and thus) autotheoretical approaches as transformative responses, reactions, and resistances to social debates about weight and ultimately the much-contested binary of fact and fiction. Combining the concept of autotheory with an approach informed by fat studies allows for a critical engagement with the debates, the (re)negations, and the dismissal of life science/medical research The fusion of autobiographical narratives into theoretical elaborations builds a cornerstone of contemporary fat life writing.

REBECCA MACKENZIE SWIMMING WITH SUBMARINES: VIOLENCE AND BECOMING ON THE CLYDE

Six months into my year of swimming, I moved to the Clyde, to a point where three lochs meet. Daily, nuclear submarines pass up to the base. I’d watch them from my window until one February morning, I ran down in my red swimsuit, down into the water. From a position in between the waves, I examine the idea of becoming within a world of violence. Delivered through multiple modes; swimming diary, lecture, choreographic gesture, along with participatory exercises to release embodied knowledge, this performative paper questions how we might embrace our innate natality.

JUDITH SCHREIER THE SIZE OF MY BODY IS A SIMPLE FACT: AUTOTHEORETICAL APPROACHES IN FAT LIFE WRITING

Chaired by Serena Wong, PhD Researcher in English Literature, University of Glasgow

HATTY NESTOR THE PERFORMATIVE 'I': ON DELLA POLLOCK AND DENISE RILEY'S EMBODIED I

How is performing the I within essay writing, a form of failure, which invites difference and collectivity into the singularity of ‘auto’? How can words have flesh, movement and performativity? What does it mean to utter I, as an expression of survival and revision? This paper will address writing the 'I' as a form of political embodiment, through theorists Della Pollack and Denise Riley. Pollock writes about how the 'I' can be performative, inviting error, disorder and difference into scholarly writing. The singularity encouraged in academic discourse, the presumption that the 'I' should be absent from it, for Pollock means that the written self might be alienated from the performance of multiple selves Through feminist theories of embodiment, she seeks to collapse the divide between the physical self and the invisible 'I' within writing

MARIA GIL ULLDEMOLINS AUTOTHEORY FOR MOUNTAINS: LAND(E)SCAPING THE FIRST-PERSON VOICE

Vivian Darroch-Lozowski’s Voice of Hearing (1984), begins with a narrator-unicorn; wording 'creatures who are-not'. As she 'shimmers' onto the page, she quotes Barthes, Cixous, Lacan, Lispector, and many others. Much later, in Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2022), a mountain’s soliloquy is broken by quotation-like technical drawings of tectonic plates. In Notes on a novel (that I am not going to write) (2017), the artist publishes a digital environment that mixes a travel diary, annotations from different sources, candid photos, hand-drawn maps, and texts written by other invited artists Can autotheory’s 'I' be ecstatic, de-centered from individual embodied subjectivity towards the choral multitude of a landscape? Can an 'auto-' be an 'allo-' without losing itself? This presentation proposes traversing autotheory’s by-now familiar territory (the meta structures, the intertextual/intermedia games, the performative referencing), to arrive somewhere else.

FRIDAY 28TH OCTOBER

13.30-15.15 - TRAMWAY

MOUTHINGAUTOTHEORY

RACHEL LYON IMITATIO AS METHOD: BECOMING CATHERINE OF SIENA'S VOICE

This work investigates the potential of shared becoming through accessing shared voice with the 14th century Tuscan mystic saint, Catherine of Siena (1347-1380). The work re-imagines Catherine's practice of imitatio Christi, through which she enters into shared bodily suffering with Christ in order to receive entry into the divine body and become a living vessel for the divine voice, as a secular feminist methodology, against conventional strategies for producing and disseminating knowledge

Holding Catherine in my mouth/giving myself to be held in Catherine’s mouth, I investigate our communal coming into being in the present day through enacting imitatio as an embodied methodology against linear temporalisation, allowing Catherine-and-I as a multiplicitous, fragmentary speaking voice to enmesh medieval mystic theology and contemporary feminist theory through bodily incorporation within the space of our shared mouth

My work takes the form of experimental writings and installations of objects created by a semi-fictional Researcher, cut off from her collaborators and attempting to bring the group together into awkward assemblages. Moments of difference, where we miscommunicate, reinterpret or second guess one another as artists, or aesthetic friends, are the generative frictions that drive the work into unknown territory. The Researcher interprets the collaborations she takes part in, interacting with theory and material as if they were friends playing a game.

For the Autotheory Conference I will present an experimental response to the presentation given by the artist Roy Claire Potter to the Contemporary Art Forum at Northumbria University in October 2021. The performance will include supplements, improvisatory asides and commentaries; reactions that are planned and live, as well as the seventeen fragments written in an overcrowded notebook on the night.

LESLEY GUY LG AND RCP CONTINUED IN FRAGMENTS

Chaired by Dr Alexandra Ross, Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curation (History of Art), University of Glasgow

MOUTHING AUTOTHEORY (PERFORMANCES): FRIDAY 28TH OCTOBER

13.30-15.15 - TRAMWAY

If the body carries wisdom as it moves through life, can the exchange of embodied experiences through collaborative artistic practice be a tool for decolonisation and epistemic justice? Can my own experience and that of my body as indigenous woman, migrant, multilingual artist, and activist assist in shifting hegemonic assessments of knowledge through auto-theory? Can the dialogical nature of txalaparta, a percussive device from the Basque Country assist us in finding spaces and methods that might answer these questions? I will address these questions through a live txalaparta performance.

The Space Junk Manifesto documents a solo, improvised text/score which orbits spontaneous song/writing and its formal, methodological and conceptual entanglements. So far, it exists in its initial incarnation as a barely legible handwritten, stream-of-consciousness text (1) (to be handed around); as an audio recording (2), and as an experimental dance video (3). Intended to be re-imagined in different locations, the manifesto has also been toured in a camper van around the Isle of Skye, in a series of secret gigs in unfixed locations, existing only in its documented form Each time the manifesto is repeated, it comes about again, through the mouth, or body, in an unpredictable fashion. In this 20-minute solo improvised performance, or ‘autotheoretical exposé’, I attempt to 'mouth autotheory' before a live audience, troubling the ontological status of the fixed material, whilst expanding the genre into musical, performative, and discursive terrain, followed by a brief Q&A.

SAMANTHA TALBOT THE SPACE JUNK MANIFESTO

NEREA BELLO SAGARZAZU TXALAPARTA, ELKARHIZKETA/TXALAPARTA A DIALOGUE

FRIDAY 28TH

WORKSHOP2

Researchers, artists, creatives and members of the public are invited to explore autotheoretical zines and engage in autotheoretical practices to create their own zine, in this 90-minute workshop.

Zines are DIY publications that often use personal experience and affective writing to explore a particular topic. Scholars have identified many categories of zines and Lauren’s research, upon which this workshop is based, poses autotheoretical zines as an additional category, one which straddles personal and political zines. Autotheoretical zines engage in cultural critique and theorising, through writing about personal experience, and they engage with other theoretical works and citational practices, accordant with existing definitions of autotheory These zines render theory into everyday language, actions and experiences, making theory more meaningful and digestible to readers, reflecting autotheory’s ambition to bridge ‘High Theory’ and lived reality.

Workshop participants will learn more about autotheoretical zines and will have the opportunity to explore examples before turning to creative practices.

Participants will be invited to:

· Engage with a work of theory in personal ways

· Respond to a series of writing prompts

· Mine prompt responses for zine content

· Create a mini-zine from autotheoretical practices and haptic zine techniques such as collage, marginalia and personal writing

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PARTICIPANTS

Please bring a photocopy of a theoretical text that resonates with you. Some works of theory will be available in the session, though the workshop will work best with your own chosen text.

LAUREN COOPER DIY THEORY: AUTOTHEORETICAL ZINE MAKING

NEXT STEPS

COMPLETE REGISTRATION

Registration is required for both online and in-person attendance. There are specific tickets to the workshops, as numbers are limited, available on a first-come basis. You'll find these in the 'addons' on Eventbrite. Please also make sure that you register for the correct attendance type: online only or in-person There is a suggested fee of £10 but we welcome higher donations

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Help us spread the word about this amazing conference. Let your colleagues, students and friends know; there are events for researchers and public audiences alike The kit contains some images for you to use on your channels

Unfortunately, the funding we have secured does not quite cover the venue costs and so we are asking for donations to support the event and to help us build a fund for catering Any and all donations are greatly appreciated

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

BIOS & CONTACT DETAILS FOR SPEAKERS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

CAT AUBURN

Northumbria University

Cat Auburn (she/her) is an Aotearoa New Zealand artist living in Scotland. Cat is currently an AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium PhD candidate. Her doctoral research is a practice-based, autotheoretical exploration into authorship and ownership of collective memory. Cat is co-editor of an upcoming Special Issue of the journal Arts, titled Autotheory in Contemporary Visual Arts Practice. She is interested in how artists engage with autotheory – particularly the difficulties of it. | www.catauburn.com | IG: @cat auburn | Twt: @catauburn

SPEAKERS& PERFORMERS

University of Glasgow

Nerea Bello is a Basque voice artist and txalaparta player based in Scotland. Her work is inspired by deep listening, by the unearthing of forgotten sounds and voices, sounds of our sonic relationship to landscape and voices that fearlessly express vulnerability and emotion, like the voice of keeners. Nerea is doing a practice PHD at the University of Glasgow exploring collaborative art as a tool for epistemic justice.

| Twt: @sagarzan | IG: @nere.bello

ELLA BERNY

Queen Mary University of London

Key:

Twt: Twitter

IG: Instagram

Ella (she/her) is a PhD student researching and writing about the limits and possibilities of abortion storytelling in contesting abortion regimes. Sometimes, she doesn’t tell people this Sometimes she tells people she’s researching reproductive justice or human geography or storytelling. Occasionally she tells all, and when she does, wonderful things sometimes happen. Then, she wonders why she sometimes self-censors. She contemplates the silences she produces as a result Why, when wonderful things can happen. | Twt: @bernyella

NEREA BELLO SAGARZAZU

CHRISTINE BORLAND

Northumbria University

Christine Borland (she/her) is a visual artist based in Argyll, Scotland and a Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle, where she co-directs the research group The Cultural Negotiation of Science. Her research is often developed in negotiation with experts in medical and scientific institutions and in museum collections to make invisible practices and hidden narratives accessible through her art works Christine’s current practice-based research focuses on engendering intimate reconnection with the ecological heritage and future of growing and making, to reflect the relationships nurtured between human and plant communities in these practices.

LISA BRADLEY

University of Glasgow

Lisa is an anti-disciplinary scholar and methodologist who uses theory and method to prise apart dominant knowledge practices towards realities unseen, and alternative modes of thinking and doing. Slow, publicfacing, and anti-colonial scholarship are central to her own academic practice, which she exercises across a number of disciplinary boundaries. She is just as at home worlding new worlds through craft and making, connecting the head, the heart, and the hand.

| Twt: @Lisa Bradley

LAUREN BUNCE

GRACE BORLAND SINCLAIR

University of Glasgow

Grace Borland Sinclair (she/her) is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow, working between the Scottish Literature Department and the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. Her research explores the speculative and fantastic fiction of Scottish women writers across the 20th century, centring the speculative imagination as an element of activist praxis She has recently published on speculative fiction and feminist consciousness-raising in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of the Scottish Literary Review and is currently a committee member of the Postgraduate Gender Research Network of Scotland.

Lauren’s intellectual life centers on questions of gender, affect, and labor in 20th century American literature. Before graduate school, Lauren worked as a high school English teacher and was also a volunteer hotline advocate for a domestic violence agency, keeping affective labor at the center of their work. She was born and raised in Miami, Florida and currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey. | bunce@princeton.edu

LAUREN COOPER

University of Glasgow

Lauren Cooper is a PhD Researcher and teaches in English and Comparative Literature. Her doctoral dissertation explores the sociopolitical interventions that autotheory makes, particularly in manifestos, zines and women's memoirs Lauren has hosted several workshops on her research, using journaling prompts and creative writing exercises as a way in to autotheory and has begun creating her own zines | www laurencooper info

Princeton University

ADAM DENTON

Queens University Belfast

My given name is Adam Denton and I make sonic art under the alias of SW1ne-Hunter. This chosen moniker has gone through a number of phonetic mutations and is a container which, similarly to my given name, contains familial, societal and historical burden I'm currently involved with embodied research into the use of sub-legal, ad hoc and contested 'urban' space, mostly in London, where I live | adenton03@qub ac uk |

@SW1n Den | www.opaltapes.com/album/ aliasing-the-empty-face

MARIA GIL ULLDEMOLINS

Hasselt University

Maria Gil Ulldemolins is a postdoctoral researcher in the Architecture and Arts faculty in Hasselt University, Belgium. Her PhD thesis was an autotheretical study of collapsing figures. Her current research explores alternative and multiple interiorities; and nonlinear, performative textual structures She is one of the co-founders of Passage (projectpassage.net), a research line and peerreviewed journal for autotheoretical and other hybrid scholarly writing. | mgilulldemolins.com @mgilulldemolins | projectpassage.net

MRINALINI GREEDHARRY

Laurentian University

GRACE DENTON

Northumbria University

Grace Denton is an artist and writer currently researching a practice-based PhD at the BxNU Institute, based in Newcastle upon Tyne and originally from West Yorkshire. Her work incorporates video, performance, text and craft, through an autotheoretical and neurodiverse lens.

For many years I’ve been thinking about how new literary theories enable people to rethink themselves, asking whether postcolonial theory does something for the black or brown student At the same time, my interest in life writing, as well as a shift in academic norms, has complicated my academic trajectory. I’m interested in the sites where writing, the self, power, ethics, and transformation come together to make new things.

| mgreedharry@laurentian.ca

INES GARCIA

Queen Mary University of London

Inés García (she/her) is a Mexican writer, translator, and PhD candidate in English at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research project, ‘Acts of Form: Self and Theory in Contemporary Writing’, looks at anecdotal theory and autotheory in contemporary women’s writing. She has been published in Poligrafías, Still Point and Post45.

| Twitter: @InesMorita | IG: @ines.morita

LESLEY GUY

Lesley Guy is an artist and writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne She is currently working on her PhD project at Northumbria University titled: It’s Better to be An Us: Exploring agency and totality within an assemblage Her work is concerned with the nature and quality of collaborative art practice, with a particular focus on friendship as a method or model for art making and world-building.

Northumbria University

MARJANA JOHANSSON

University of Glasgow

I am interested in people’s experiences of work and the workplace, and how we can make sociological sense of those experiences beyond the individual. Recently I have done feminist collaborative autoethnographic writing about class, gender and academia grounded in my own experience as a first-generation university student, and now academic I would like to further my writing and my understanding through exploring perspectives on autotheory | @MGreedharry

| marjana johansson@glasgow ac uk

MARJANA KRAJAC

Ohio State University

Marjana Krajac is a choreographer, choreographic researcher, and a Ph.D. Candidate in Dance Studies at The Ohio State University Her research is focused on the emancipatory potentials of dance and aims to rethink the choreographic gesture as an expanded text, particularly as related to the site of its praxis. She works through theory in multiple ways and understands it as an essentially choreographic endeavor | www.marjanakrajac.com/

RACHEL LYON

University of Glasgow

Rachel Lyon is a writer and practice researcher based in Glasgow. Her recent PhD combined her deep interest in feminist theorisations of self with her love for Catherine of Siena (13471380), a woman often celebrated for her mystic theology, her ecstasies, and her political reach, but less often as a proto-feminist icon Rachel’s research hopes to right that balance, revealing Catherine as a powerful writer whose unconventional reading of the self is deeply relevant to feminists today.

REBECCA MACKENZIE

University of Glasgow

Novelist and improvisor. My most recent performance, Collider, was developed following field research at CERN where I collaborated with a CERN physicist to investigate collisions of body, text and primordial energy. My novel IN A LAND OF PAPER GODS was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2017 and was an Observer Fiction Highlight and a Red Magazine Book of the Year

| www.rebeccamackenzie.com

ANGIE LEE

Angie Lee works as social media coordinator for Manchester International Festival and soon-to-come The Factory She has previously worked for music festivals in South Korea, where she is from. With an academic background in psychology and cross-cultural fandom research, her interests lie in placemaking, fandoms and identity, intersectional feminism, and decolonizing and decentralizing the creative industries She also runs a small calligraphy & lettering design business, LIYD Lettering Studio.

EMILY MOECK

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Emily Moeck is a PhD candidate in English, Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee, where she teaches in both the English and Cinema Studies departments. Her work is interested in the intersection of the archive, narratology, and race and gender studies. Her work has appeared most recently in Consequence Magazine, Fugue, and New Letters, where she was nominated for the O. Henry Prize.

| emoeck@vols.utk.edu

JEANA MOODY

University of Idaho

Jeana Moody (they/she) is an educational facilitator, program coordinator and independent researcher. Among other opportunities, they have been an Associate Lecturer at Prague City University, received a Master’s degree in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Oregon State University, and taught in various contexts in Europe, Asia and the U.S. Their passion projects include reading and blogging about feminist speculative fiction and working towards outdoor recreation accessibility and responsible stewardship. | jeanasmoody@gmail com

XENIA MURA FINK

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Xenia Mura Fink is an artist and PhD candidate. Her practice encompasses works on paper, installations, and animation. Since 2017 she has been teaching drawing at various universities. In her artistic research, she explores the charged intersections of figuration, desire, and the gaze against the backdrop of feminist discourses Mura Fink has published on the feminine within Adolf Loos’s architectural work and the capacity of drapery as a gendered phenomenon. | xeniafink.de | IG :@xeniafink

HATTY NESTOR

Hatty Nestor is a researcher and writer. She has been writer-in-residence at the Jerwood Space in London (2017) and critic-inresidence at Studio Das Weisse Haus in Vienna (2019) Her writing appears in Frieze, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta, The White Review, and other publications. Both her poetry pamphlet The Aching Poem (Boise State Press), and Ethical Portraits (Zero Books), were published in 2021. | @hnestor

ABHISEK PAL

Jadavpur University, India

Abhisek Pal is a M Phil Researcher at Jadavpur University, India and is currently researching on figurations of the gay male muse and the dynamics between queer desire and creativity in literature, films and performance art. He is also interested in postcolonial theory and dystopias Besides, he fanatically obsesses over Lady Gaga and Pokemon. Presently he is trying to follow through with a personal goal of reading all the works of the French memoirist Annie Ernaux available in English translation.

| abhisekpal535@gmail.com

REBECCA MACKENZIE

University of Glasgow

Novelist and improvisor. My most recent performance, Collider, was developed following field research at CERN where I collaborated with a CERN physicist to investigate collisions of body, text and primordial energy. My novel IN A LAND OF PAPER GODS was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2017 and was an Observer Fiction Highlight and a Red Magazine Book of the Year.

| www.rebeccamackenzie.com

GODA PALEKAITE

Hasselt University

Goda Palekaitė is an artist and researcher working across contemporary art, performance, literature, and anthropology. Her projects explore politics of historical narratives, agency of imagination, and conditions of creativity, intertwining personal experiences with historical and fictional characters’. Goda presented her performances, videos and installations at Whitechapel Gallery, London; BOZAR Brussels; Biennale Architettura, Venice; Vilnius Contemporary Art Center; Kunsthal Ghent, among others Her book of fiction 'Schismatics' was published in 2020.

| www.palekaite.space | IG: @goda palekaite

Birkbeck University of London

TANIA ROMERO

Villanova University

Tania Romero (MA, MFA) is a Nicaraguan filmmaker, digital media instructor, and published bilingual poet. Her credits include: the short documentary Helmets from Heath (2013) and Even with their nails: Women filmmakers of Nicaragua (2016). Recently, she co-produced the short San Marcos River Project, a documentary streamed on PBS Austin. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Media Production at Villanova University, focused on border culture, immigration, and Central America. | tania.romero@villanova.edu

JUDITH SCHREIER

Humboldt-University of Berlin

Between academia and fat activism, Judith Schreier loves to browse social media, dive into any kind of queer media, take care of her plants and sometimes to write poetry and short stories herself. In 2019, she organized the first queer zine festival, Squeezie, in Leipzig and now she is part of a new collective, qcoon, who tries to create a permanent queer community space in Leipzig.

| judithjschreier@gmail com | @youdidscream |

BRIT SCHULTE

University of Texas at Austin

Brit Schulte is an Art History PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, a community organizer, and zinester. They study print objects, as well as sex working, queer and trans* histories Their current organizing efforts involve criminalized survivors, prison/police abolition, and the decriminalization of sex work Their writing may be found at The Funambulist, In These Times, Monthly Review, The Appeal, and Truthout.

ISABELLA SHIELDS

University of Edinburgh

Isabella Shields is a writer and PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, where she also teaches Literary Studies. She is establishing director and curator of 16 Nicholson Street contemporary art gallery in Glasgow. Her work focuses on trauma theory, intermediality, and the dissolution of boundaries within culturally prominent systems of representation. Her work-in-progress novel ‘A Common Spring’ was developed into a radio play for Radiophrenia in November 2020.

| ishields@ed.ac.uk

HANNAH SPRUCE

University of Leicester

Hannah is an early career researcher in the field of contemporary women's writing. She teaches at Leeds Beckett University and works on sustained outreach programmes at the University of Leeds. In January 2019, she started 'Bookish' a nonfiction reading group through which she met Angie Lee and many other wonderful women. Her favourite autotheoretical text is Julietta Singh’s The Breaks (which was the group read in Oct 2021) | H.Spruce@leeds.ac.uk | IG: @bookishleeds

JAKOB SUMMERER

Trinity College Dublin

Jakob Summerer is a PhD student and parttime lecturer currently immersed in metaphor theory. Having started out as a postgraduate merely dipping his toes into Stanzelian and Genettian narratology, he quickly found himself bathing in the study of autopathography (infused with a dash of cognitive stylistics) His favourite bath-side refreshment, he has come to realise, lies in teaching Irish undergrads, and encouraging them to distinguish between narrator and author | jakob summerer@gmx de

SAMANTHA TALBOT

University of Glasgow

Samantha Talbot/Sam Lou Talbot is a musician, performance artist, poet, and popular music academic She is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Glasgow, and a Lecturer in Popular Music at Perth College, UHI Her research pioneers an aesthetic and onto-epistemology of spontaneous song/writing and its formal, methodological, and conceptual entanglements.

| glasgow academia edu/SamanthaLTalbot | linktr.ee/samloutalbot | samloutalbot.com

MINDY PTOLOMEY, INDIA BOXALL, DAN PERRY, MICHAEL MALT-CULLEN, AND LISA BRADLEY

University of Glasgow

We are a group of researchers based in the School of Education, thinking from and through different institutional roles (MSc student, pre-doctoral candidates, PhD researcher and lecturer) and conditions (from student, to precariously employed, to permanent contract status). These differences afford us different proximities to broader publics, as well as reveal something of the internal structures and mechanisms under which conditions and practices of knowledgemaking emerge.

| Twt:

Mindy Ptolomey - @amandasays

India Boxall - @paperseeps

Dan Perry- @danpacademic

Michael Malt-Cullen - @MaltCullen

Lisa Bradley - @Lisa Bradley

INFORMATION FOR DELEGATES

WATCH PARTY

WEDNESDAY 26 OCTOBER

Join other delegate watch the online pa the keynote addres Lauren Fournier, on in Glasgow and net during the breaks. D for any or all of the panels. Open to all registered delegates. No additional booking necessary.

Venue: University of Glasgow Gilbert Scott Building (Main University Building) Room 132

CONFERENCE DINNER

All delegates are invited to join us at a conference dinner on Thursday 27 October at 18.30. We will dine privately at the Grosvenor Cafe: a former cinema turned ambient restaurant, close to the University, on the picturesque and iconic Ashton Lane

A three course meal will be served for a price of £29 pp. To reserve your place, send your full payment to paypal.me/autotheoryconference and complete your menu choices using the link below, by Tuesday 18 October. We look forward to spending this time with you.

Please email us if you have any dietary or accessibility concerns and we will liaise with the venue

IMPORTANT: please select the 'friends & family' payment type on PayPal to avoid fees being deducted from your deposit

Glasgow

VIEW THE MENU

24 Ashton Lane

VENUE: GROSVENOR CAFE

SPECIAL THANKS

INFORMATION ABOUT CONFERENCE ORGANISERS & FUNDERS

FUNDERS

SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR FUNDERS FOR MAKING THE CONFERENCE POSSIBLE

Thank you to all delegates and friends who have supported the conference through registration fees and donations. Your donations have played a big role in funding the event and we couldn't have pulled off the event without this support.

We would also like to thank The MIT Press for kindly providing us with several copies of Lauren Fournier's book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism, which we have been able to donate and raffle to raise funds for GWL.

The Contemporary Women's Writing Association (CWWA) has kindly sponsored the panel 'Feminist Redux'. The CWWA is a network of researchers interested in contemporary women’s writing in all genres. It welcomes academics, writers, performers, publishers and reading groups and has a subnetwork for PGRs and ECRs. The association regularly hosts conferences and events and you can find out more and become a member at www thecwwa org

This conference is largely funded by the College of Arts Collaborative Research Award (CRA) from the University of Glasgow, to support the collaboration between the conference, Glasgow Women's Library, Tramway and crossdisciplinary speakers and delegates from around the world The conference organisers would like to thank the CRA committee for supporting this event We also received support from the English Literature department

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

WITH THANKS TO THE CONFERENCE ASSISTANTS

Christina Chatzitheodorou

Wei Zhao

Elisa Pesce

AND OUR PANEL CHAIRS

Rebecca MacKenzie

Dr Alexandra Ross

Professor Alexandra Shepard

Lauren Cooper (she/her) is a PhD researcher and teaches at the University of Glasgow. Her thesis is on the socio-political interventions that autotheory makes in memoir, manifestos & zines. Lauren often hosts writing workshops based on her research and recently started making her own zines

Dženana Vucic

(she/they) is a BosnianAustralian essayist, poet and critic She is in the final months of a PhD in English Literature at the University of Glasgow and is also writing an autotheoretical book about the Bosnian war, identity, un/belonging and memory. She tweets at @dzenanabanana.

Samantha Talbot/Sam Lou Talbot is a musician, performance artist, poet, and popular music academic. She is a Doctoral Candidate at U of Glasgow, and a Lecturer in Popular Music at Perth College, UHI Her research pioneers an aesthetic and onto-epistemology of spontaneous song/writing and its formal, methodological, and conceptual entanglements samloutalbot.com. Twitter: @talbot sl. Instagram: @samloutalbotmusic

Serena Wong is a PhD Researcher in English Literature and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Glasgow. She researches on modernist literature, particularly on the texts of Virginia Woolf and concepts of orientalism. Her doctoral project also works closely with racial and postcolonial theories

CONTACT

QUESTIONS

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autotheoryconference2022 wordpress com @autotheory2022

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