The term autotheory was coined by Stacey Young in Changing the Wor(l)d (1997) to describe the work of the women of color writers and activists behind Kitchen Table Press and This Bridge Called My Back (1981), gaining critical traction when Maggie Nelson used it to describe her 2016 book The Argonauts. She borrowed the term from Franco-Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado, who named his 2008 Testo Junkie an autoteoría. The latter texts foreground queerness and have whitewashed autotheory from its intersectional origins. Recent special issues and edited volumes on the autotheoretical turn and the production of autotheories in the plural (Brostoff and Cooppan 2025 Autotheories) have drawn further critical attention to the genre from decolonial and intersectional approaches.This seminar aims to center queer voices of color by placing autotheory in conversation with biomythography, a precedent to autotheory coined by Audre Lorde in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and fabulation, a concurrent methodology and practice rooted in black studies.

Lorde's "biomythography" replaces the "auto" of "autobiography" with "myth," emphasizing the necessity of crafting the self as "an explanation of the inexplicable" (Shockley 2026 "A Timeless Take on Autobiography"). Her storytelling is invested in the collective and untold stories of many black women's experiences, simultaneously accurate and fictional (Hall 2004 Conversations with Audre Lorde, 109-110). To conceive of writing the self as mythmaking is to both claim and construct a mythic cultural tradition that exceeds the past, remaining malleable as well as rooted in personal and collective embodiment. This is not to deny the theorizing force of Lorde's text, however. She writes in the same Black feminist tradition of Barbara Christian and bell hooks, both of whom critique the dichotomy of theory vs practice, insisting instead that theory is produced through metabolizing and articulating one's material experience as inflected by race, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on.

This seminar welcomes proposals that engage with critical race studies, black studies, and queer of color critique in order to stretch and interrogate the genre of autotheory. We encourage proposals whose focus extend beyond literature (art, performance, film, etc.). Suggested topics include the following as they relate to autotheory and/or biomythography:

• Queer of color practices of self-/re-naming 
• Inextricability of the personal from the collective in narrative self-fashioning
• Critical fabulation (Hartman 2008 "Venus in Two Acts") and afro-fabulation (Nyong'o 2018 Afro-Fabulations)
• Deidealization of archival queer figures (Amin 2017 Disturbing Attachments)
• Queer temporalities produced by mythmaking
  • Tension between queer relations as historical/retrograde vs political/utopian/theoretical (Amin 2017, 24)
  • Mythmaking as a survival tactic that dwells in the "tenseless time" of blackness (Musser 2019 "Toward Mythic Feminist Theorizing")