Queer Autobibliography. Acts of Reading and Ways of Belonging

Abstract

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 suggests that books performing these dual roles of location and authority play out in the intertextual nature of their works: a rereading of their own works and characters and a 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 construct an affective community (underlining intergenerational friendships and relational networks), queer history of the Anglo-American world (detailing the oppression, shame, and pride), and literary history of the twentieth century (highlighting the omission of queer desire). 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 theories of reading. Broadly, it seeks to throw light on Isherwood and White’s oeuvres, which, despite their rich innovations, have not received much scholarly attention from autobiography studies.