This seminar invites papers on queer and trans life-writing practices between the 19th century and the present. We take a capacious view of what constitutes “life-writing”: in addition to conventional literary genres for recording individual experience (auto/biography, memoir, diary, letters), we consider nontextual forms (oral, visual, performance), amateur and improvised archival practices, and remediations and recombinations of conventional life-writings in emergent and hybrid genres. Similarly, the seminar treats “queer” and “trans” as provisional categories that surface across expressions, forms, and geopolitical and historical contexts in diverse ways often misaligned with our contemporary vernacular usages. Taking wing from recent queer and trans remediations of the archive (Gill-Peterson 2018/2024; “Queering Archives” 2015; Singh 2018), the booming popularity of what G. Thomas Couser has called “the some-body memoir” (2009), and interdisciplinary “turns” to quotidian, ephemeral, and archival materials in postcolonial, Black, and Indigenous studies (Arondekar 2009/2024; Stoler 2008; Hartman 2008; Sharpe 2016/2023), this seminar pursues three questions: How do queer and trans life-writings index histories of suppression as well as resistance? What do the affordances and constraints of particular life-writing genres and practices offer to the study of queer and trans expression, collective life, and social movements? How do scholarly and artistic curations and reimaginings of queer/trans life-writings contend with the twinned alterity and intimacy, tedium and intrigue, and violence and resistance in these sources?


Centering life-writings and their critical-creative remediations, this seminar agitates the vexed place of life-writings within literary studies, which are often positioned as forms marginal to “proper” literary and cultural artifacts and approached as transparent and nonfictive repositories of information. They can also be deployed in disingenuous or coercive ways, as Sandy Stone (1992) has shown in the context of sensationalist “memoirs” of gender transition from the 1930s-1970s. Yet, life-writings also function as an important site of subaltern resistance under circumstances of oppression – representing, at times, the only expressive resource available to marginalized individuals, particularly when formal education and literacy are denied. From Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written in Reading Gaol in 1897; to the “generic activism” Melanie Micir (2019) locates in the archival “passion projects” of queer women artists in midcentury England; to the Indigenous “compilations” and “assemblages” produced both for use and as an act of resistance (K. Wisecup 2021), life-writing practices serve as insurgent tools of individual expression, interpersonal intimacy, and political organizing.


This seminar welcomes papers that engage queer/trans life-writings from a broad range of geographical, historical, and cultural contexts.