UC Berkeley

While recent feminist scholarship has hailed the rise of autotheory as a U.S.-based hybridization of autobiography and theory, this dissertation situates the field in a broader literary movement that emerges concurrently across marginalized writing communities. Rather than understand “autotheory” as a unitary category that renders global practices intelligible as such, I compare the historically and culturally specific ways in which marginalized writers have challenged the role of self-figuration in academic writing in the U.S., and, to a lesser extent, in Brazil. As the disciplinary landscape of the humanities shifted in the 1970s, two contemporaneous developments came to the fore: the rise of high theory and the institutionalization of gender and race studies. On the margins of these developments, groups of writers began staging encounters in which anecdote rubs elbows with theory and vignette bumps hips with philosophy. Crossing generic and geopolitical borders, this transnational corpus, which I call “bodies of theory,” contends with the disciplinary constraints of academic writing by intervening in the composition of both contemporary literature and theory. My project investigates such bodies of theory in tandem, probing the political effects they have at varying historical and geographic junctures.

Combining intellectual and disciplinary history with close readings, I compare the academic contexts and broader social movements from which this corpus emerges and upon which it acts. In chapters on U.S. Third World Feminism’s “theory in the flesh,” Brazilian marginal poetry’s “body in heteronyms,” a transdisciplinary “transgender aesthetic,” and Euro-American crossings of “autotheory,” I home in on writers including Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Ana Cristina César, and Paul B. Preciado, who forge modes of fleshing out an “auto” that undoes the “self” suggested by its etymology. Rather than distinguish a singular self, this writing is auto-relational, relating a writing subject bound to others. What emerges is not a single intervention with a single name. Instead, in reading auto-relational writing as a part of broader social struggles, I argue that bodies of theory open up inclusive methods of writing in the university and the public humanities.