Intimacies of Relation: The Autotheoretical Turn

Vilashini Cooppan
Literature & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
UC Santa Cruz

Autotheory, a hybrid genre blending critical theory and first person narrative, has spread rapidly over the past decade. Ours is the first U.S.-based conference to convene transdisciplinary scholars from across the UC and beyond to offer a comprehensive account of autotheory’s multiple genealogies, genre-bending forms, and intersectional epistemologies. The “auto” of autotheory, too often understood as simply the writing “I,” is in fact a self yoked to other selves and larger social structures. Coinciding with a spate of special issues and the 2025 publication of the first volume on the subject (edited by the co-organizers), this conference harnesses the momentum of fieldmapping by asking: why autotheory and why now? Participants gather to investigate autotheory’s emergent archive of cultural objects and its synthesis of critical-creative practice, situating them under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism and the resurgence of identity politics. Autotheory’s reparative form bears witness to and works through the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and the violences of cisheteropatriarchy, ableism, and more. Approaches include autoethnography, autofiction, and creative nonfiction, social movements, BIPOC feminisms, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, trans/queer studies, disability studies, and new media studies. Announcing an arrival and mapping a future, this conference launches a field into motion.