Queer Autobibliography

Christopher Isherwood and Edmund White engage with autobiographical genres and negotiate their queer subjectivity in radical ways. Queer Autobibliography: Acts of Reading and Ways of Belonging argues that this negotiation takes place in and through books: books they write, publish, help to publish, read, borrow, lend, gift, and learn from. Books and reading become sites as well as strategies in their works to construct their queer politics, forge solidarities and curate queer bonds. This volume argues that books performing these dual roles of location as well as authority play out in the intertextual nature of their works: rereading of their own works and characters, redramatization of their lives in different idioms. It results in books being critical in evaluating society's homophobia as well as significant in terms of its materiality: (re)reading and (re)writing as political moves. Thus, in their autobiographical works, books become a means of affective community (or the lack of it), queer history of the Anglo-American world (including the oppression, shame and pride), literary history of the twentieth century (with the omission of queer desire), and mode of intergenerational friendships and camaraderie. Queer Autobibliography undertakes this novel mode of analysis by coupling queer theory and autobiography studies by mobilizing current scholarship on queer relationality, queer time and narrative theory that will delimit the precincts of autobiography studies and queer theory.