Gender, Sexuality, Autobiography: Beyond the Performative Utterance, WiSe 2020, Anna Poletti

In this workshop we will reconsider the widely held understanding of autobiography as a performative utterance that brings the self into being by engaging with Eve Sedgwick’s theory of the ‘periperformative utterance’. Is there such a thing as periperformative autobiography? And if so, what forms might it take? Is this one way of understanding the autofictional work of a feminist writer like Chris Kraus? What forms of textuality, aesthetics, mediation and materiality does the periperformative utterance require? And what is its relationship to theories of gender, affect, sexuality and autobiography?