Dicktation: Autotheory in the Coupled Voice

some things are better done with others. we say autotheory is one of them.

As an emerging neologism, the critical use-value of autotheory attaches to the way in which the self-referentiality of "auto" nuances the abstract claims of "theory." In this account the normative hegemony of theory is evidenced by its continued association with modalities of thought that sidestep the subjective and are most at home in an impersonal writing style that generates the illusion that theory is a rarefied substance floating clear of the structures it analyzes. Although the term has recently entered the critical lexicon in connection with third-wave and fourth-wave feminist writing, it is a scholarly commonplace that autotheory also speaks to a longer history of feminist engagements with the autobiographical. This connection is so tight that in a recent overview of the field, Lauren Fournier asserts that "the history of feminism is, in a sense, the history of autotheory," thereby wiping out any distinction between the two in favor of a single feminist-autotheoretical vector, "one that actively seeks to bridge theory and practice and that upholds tenets like 'the personal is political'" (645).

While linking the popularization of the term to the promotion and reception of Maggie Nelson's 2015 memoir, The Argonauts, Fournier traces its origins further back to 1997 and Stacey Young's discussion of 1980's feminist writing as an autobiographically inflected "counterdiscourse" in which "women of color and lesbian women's theorizing from the perspective of their own lived experiences" produced what is now recognized as an intersectional analytic (qtd. in Fournier 647). As an innately feminist genre, autotheory of this kind continues to focus on gendered subordination as a racialized, classed and embodied experience, but now directs the diaristic and confessional forms associated with earlier modes of feminist life-writing against theory, including the feminist, gender and queer theories that are part of its own genealogy.

There is another version of autotheory on the books, however, that does not merely use "auto" as a corrective to "theory." In 2015, the same year that The Argonauts appears, Mieke Bal makes a proprietary (and backdated) claim to a hyphenized "auto-theory" in an essay that appears in an anthology on documentary film, in which she both lays out a theory of autotheory and points to an earlier 2007 essay of hers—"Lost in Space, Lost in the Library"—that she retrospectively claims as "auto-theoretical" ("Documenting What?" n. 17). In the 2015 essay, the prefix auto does not refer to the self-licensing force of the autobiographical experience. Rather, the term refers to a process through which one's own creative outputs become "secondary objects of analysis" in an "ongoing, spiraling form of analysis-theory dialectic." Because Bal's own films are at the core of this "spiral-like" theoretical process, she dubs this form of critical re-engagement "auto-theory" (124). The auto here does not in the least license the personal as the crucible of knowledge but relates to previously self-authored work that, in becoming the object of secondary analysis, sustains the "tripartite theoretical activity" that Hubert Damisch associates with theoretical objects more generally (134). A text or artefact is a theoretical object, according to Damisch, if, and only if, it satisfies three criteria: "it is posed in theoretical terms; it produces theory; and it necessitates a reflection on theory" (qtd. in Bal 133). In Bal's modification, the theoretical object that poses, produces and necessitates a reflection on theory must also be of one's own making in order to render the tripartite process autotheoretical. Empowered through its theoretical reengagement, previously unrealised ideas embedded in the object are released in a process that is often ruled by accident or serendipity rather than the rational requirements of empirical research ("Lexicon" 72).

Bal also introduces a requirement for a temporal delay between the moment in which a work is first produced and the moment it becomes available as a theoretical object after it has found its place in the world: "In the dynamic between the works as objects, their...