Contemporary Queer and/or Trans Life Writing: Locating the Autobiographical “I”
The CFP included this question: How does contemporary Trans/Queer life writing conceptualize the self as situated within community and/or storytelling practices? An enthusiastic session response made it clear that life-writing is inspiring critical work both from established scholars and from new kids on the block (a cultural reference that dates and places me, the organiser, as a North American, probably Canadian because of the s in organiser, invoking 1980s pop culture). The strong abstracts submitted also indicated that a great deal of the emerging critical work in 2025 confronts, documents, and engages with written and filmed accounts of exclusion, alienation, violence, and loss – loss of inclusion and of full selfhood, loss of trans lives. In this North American literary-critical moment, trans life-writing can be a positive focus of academic organizing for MLA 2026. The life-writers – memoirists, diarists, script-writers – written about in the abstracts submitted to this session have already made their own spaces creatively, and now critics are opening up new and other spaces in and through academic discourse. Academic discourse is not small, and life-writing is not insignificant. It is a form of documentation of the self that can and does often include crisis witnessing and hard-hitting materials. It is not an accident that the current US administration is cutting university funding lines and justifying that retroactively, just as it is doing so for changes of sex id in the passports of trans persons renewing their government self-identification materials.
The third edition of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Reading Autobiography Now came out in 2024. This edition features new materials on everything from blogging to indeterminate fictional forms – autofiction as a (problem) genre – a confirmation in itself that life narrative studies is an expansive, multinational, multimedia field. In 2025, reviewing multiple submissions (9) for this panel, the strongest were these three, all of them choosing to tackle difficult questions about genre itself, but each in a different way. This trans-focused session is an individual academic response to my observation of the systematic erasure of writing about trans people from government publications in the contemporary USA, e.g. the Trump administration has erased references to transgender people from New York's Stonewall National Monument website. On the National Park Service website, the acronym LGBTQ+ has been shortened to LGB. A Canadian citizen, I am now more comfortable attending MLA in Toronto – though I do not live there – as a woman living with disability and working on transgender studies and reproductive justice, than I would be in Cambridge, MA (where I went to school, at Harvard).
This panel centres early career academics – postdoc, early doc, finishing doc – all at different stages, working on trans life-writing and storytelling. Their work is multinational, and involves multimedia materials. The thematic element that brings all three together is genre itself as a creative playing field. Dr. Benoît Loiseau will present first with: ‘This Book Is Not an Autofiction’: Fabulating Selves Beyond Psychoanalytic Paradigms in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008). Testo Junkie starts with the line “This book is not an autofiction.” With this memorable statement, the French edition of Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) – translated from Spanish by the author –immediately positions itself in tension with the autofictional tradition. The book is a challenge in more than one language, multiply written by the same person, a comparative literature scholar’s dream. Dr. Loiseau approaches this dream, appropriately enough, through psychoanalytic works. Sophie Been will present second, on “Writing the Body/Self: Affective Multimodal Self-Representation in Paige Maylott’s My Body is Distant (2023).” Maylott’s work deals with both digital and physical selves, in Canadian contexts. Been’s work takes the session into affect theory through engagement with Eve Sedgwick, and into trans cultural production through engagement with the work of Susan Stryker. The third speaker will be Levi Hord, with ““I am Orlando: The Universal Nonbinary “I” in Paul Preciado’s Orlando: My Political Biography.” In Preciado’s 2023 film debut Orlando: My Political Biography, twenty trans actors are cast alongside Preciado in the role of Orlando, spreading the textual citation of Woolf’s character across multiple bodies, identities, and languages.
This session moves from psychoanalysis to affect theory to film studies step by step. The most junior speaker is in the middle speaking slot. Each talk will be 15 minutes long. Each person will take 1 or 2 questions right after their talk, but let the rest of the questions wait.