How do you write yourself? Queer studies has arisen as a stance of critical thought towards the assumptions we make about gender and sexuality. With thinkers from Leo Bersani and Audre Lorde, this project looks at the way writers use queer memoir as auto-theory, from which they make sense of their own embodied and personal experience. This paper reads Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House with an eye towards the ways each writer constructs what love, desire, gender, and language are and can be. Attentive to the ways these queer memoirists write their own intersecting identities, the work explores the freedom and constraints of language as a tool for self-articulation. By centering the voices of individual writers on their own lives, I invoke the idea that the universal is in the particular. This way, we can learn from ourselves.
Willis, Lily,
"“Expressing the Inexpressible”: Language and Self in Contemporary Memoir"
(2022).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/851d-6m84
