Aurell and Davis’s recognition of our never-assured access to individual and collective pasts especially resonates for LGBTQ life writers, who must contend with these limits with an urgency that often demands experimentation and creativity. Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall wrote in 2019’s Witnessing Girlhood about the challenges faced by trans adults who seek to narrativize their individual childhoods, an observation that built on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s body of work considering the “ghostliness” of the gay child. Thinking collectively in her 2020 discussion of queer collaged autobiographies, Anna Poletti reminded us of the ways in which queered practices of self-life-inscription resist an easy relationship with assumptions about how marginalized voices might engage with and enter into the historical record. As the queer/trans authors considered by this panel strategically negotiate the constraints and affordances of pasts potentially remaining inaccessible, they move the conversation between History and Life Writing forward while looking backwards.

Recognizing previous scholarship considering the relationships of queer/trans life writing to history that includes the work of Scott Bravmann (1997) and Bertram J. Cohler (2007), this panel limits itself to the “new material” of life writing published in the last decade while maintaining an understanding of these relationships as invitingly under-studied for older texts, too. Our three panelist will speak for fifteen minutes each to allow for discussion between the audience and panelists at the end.

Eleanor Ty will open the conversation with a consideration of Ocean Vuong’s 2019 memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Recognizing Vuong’s text as the first to engage the ongoing effects of traumatic memory tied to Vietnamese-American refugee status for a young queer protagonist, Ty develops an analysis of his memoir’s narrative structure and poetic style as techniques that finally bring Vietnamese and American history’s repetitive intrusions on the present into focus even as she draws on Michel Foucault to underscore how Vuong’s protagonist remains in a homophobically and racially inscribed “state of conscious and permanent visibility.” Vuong’s narrative and style strategies work to negotiate both what is hidden and what is hypervisible in a text committed to individual and collective Vietnamese-American histories.

Moving from possibilities for uncovering the hidden to what cannot be repaired or restored in queer life narratives, Jacob Aplaca discusses how Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019) and Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020) participate in a persistent evocation within queer memoir of archival silences. Reading Machado and Shapland in context with a theoretical conversation on queer archives that includes Ann Cvetkovich, Anjali Arondekar, and Jack Halberstam, Aplaca argues that Machado and Shapland’s attempts at archival repair meet moments in which they “cannot make right” the absences they address. Aplaca’s conclusion embraces the potential of this disappointment for freeing the queer archival economy from a rigid paradigm of lack and fulfillment.

Finally, Eamon Schlotterback gives a name to our panel’s position in the intersections of life writing, queer theory, and history by describing Sybil Lamb’s 2014 autobiographical novel I’ve Got a Time Bomb as making “history soup.” Still an under-recognized text, I’ve Got a Time Bomb’s explosive engagement with non-linear time invites Schlotterback to consider a crip/trans temporality that links past violence and the future in ways that intervene in understandings of queer futurity deriving from Lee Edelman or José Esteban Muñoz. Schlotterback also recognizes Lamb’s potential to disrupt discourse about the legibility of the subject in trans autobiographical studies. Schlotterback’s discussion develops a theory of trans narrativity that moves towards a fuller conceptualization of the trans past, present, and future.