Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice: Performing Theory in Post-1960s Feminist Art, Literature, and Criticism

Autotheory is a term that has emerged in the zeitgeist of contemporary feminist cultural production to describe works of literature, art, and criticism that integrate autobiography and other explicitly subjective modes with philosophy and theory in experimental ways. While an emergent term, autotheorya merging of the autobiographical with the philosophical or theoreticalcan be traced through earlier feminist art, literature, theory, and activism. In this dissertation, I take up autotheory in relation to a selection of post-1960s textschoosing works that engage a practice of autotheory in particularly performative waysto consider the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of this feminist practice across media. Moving between the disciplines of English literature, Art History, Curatorial Studies, and Performance Studies and grounding my transdisciplinary methodology in Mieke Bals notion of concept-based practices for interdisciplinary research, I historicize and theorize autotheory through close readings of three primary texts: Adrian Pipers Food for the Spirit (1971), Chris Krauss I Love Dick (1997), and Maggie Nelsons The Argonauts (2015). As I conduct extended readings of these three works, I gesture to related texts by other artists and writers to read the given work in relation to a larger movement or community of autotheoretical feminist and queer feminist impulses. My inquiry into autotheory involves reading works that have been described as autotheoretical (like The Argonauts) and recasting older works in light of this new term (like Food). I contextualize autotheory in a larger history of conceptualism, body art, performance, and art writing practices, and I focus on the period between the late 1960s and the present (late 2010s) as a pivotal time for thinking through autotheory as an aesthetic mode. I conclude that, for feminist artists and writers working in the wake of modernism, autotheory becomes a ripe mode of practice for processing, metabolizing, embodying, enacting, wracking, wrestling with, and reiterating or performing philosophy and theory from embodied, autobiographical, and otherwise subjectivized positionings; this is often done in ways that resonate with a politics of intersectionality and the move toward integrating art, life, theory, and practice.