Both Marxist standpoint theory, and decolonial epistemologies ground knowledge claims in embodied experience, particularly the experience of oppressed groups. Central to both traditions is the concept of epistemic privilege: the thesis that marginalized positions (the proletariat, women*, the colonized, the subaltern) provide unique access to aspects of social reality that remain invisible to dominant groups. Our article examines autotheory not as a tradition with clear genealogical lines but as a constellation of parallel epistemological practices emerging from various margins of dominant knowledge systems. We follow autotheory from Georg Lukács’s analysis of reification to postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, as articulated by Gloria Anzaldúa, arguing that queer-feminist Marxism serves as the crucial bridge between these traditions. Furthermore, we argue that epistemic privilege emerges from contradictions between oppressed groups’ normative self-understandings and the practices they are compelled to perform under systems of domination. This framework reveals how dominant epistemologies objectify oppressed groups by treating them instrumentally – as objects of study – while systematically denying their status as autonomous knowledge producers. Autotheory responds by reclaiming epistemic subjectivity without abandoning robust truth claims. This illuminates Anzaldúa’s concept of la facultad as the heightened perceptual capacity developed by those inhabiting borderlands, a survival epistemology born from navigating structural contradictions. Autotheory in Marxist, queer-feminist and decolonial registers contests objectification, theorizing how those positioned at capitalism’s, heteropatriarchy’s and colonialism’s margins might transform themselves and their worlds through practices of epistemic self-liberation.
This article examines autotheory in the fiction of Abdellah Taïa through the concept of the translation of the self. Drawing on three key works – L’Armée du salut (2006), Celui qui est digne d’être aimé (2017), and Vivre à ta lumière (2022) – it explores how the Moroccan writer transforms life writing into a critical dispositif that articulates language, the body, and displacement. For Abdellah Taïa, writing in French, the language of the former coloniser, constitutes both an act of linguistic insubordination and a strategy of identity reconfiguration. The article demonstrates how the queer Arab body is translated into a different idiom, producing an embodied mode of thought that subverts dominant Western theoretical frameworks. Drawing on the work of Paul Preciado, Édouard Glissant, bell hooks, and Walter Mignolo, this analysis proposes the concept of diasporic autotheory, grounded in mobility, memory, and relationality. Taïa’s writing is far more than testimony: it constitutes a space of political and poetic reflection in which translation – linguistic, corporeal, and affective – lies at the very heart of subjectivity. This poetics of passage ultimately redefines humanism through vulnerability and plurality, transforming fracture into a condition of thought and relation.
This essay reflects on the themes, arguments, and creative process of my PhD thesis, an autotheoretical memoir exploring the experience of being neurodivergent, non-binary and closeted within Greek society. Drawing on a combination of creative and theoretical methodologies, I examine my lived experiences through a self-reflexive and analytical lens. This process unfolds through a dialogue with scholars, writers and artists who inspired my research and personal journey. I explore how experiences, feelings, bodily sensations, interpersonal interaction and community participation can be critically examined through autotheory. In doing so, I aim to illuminate aspects of Greek millennial, non-binary, and neurodivergent life. A central argument of my research is that coming out as a queer person is never an isolated personal choice, but is shaped by cultural, social, and familial contexts. Equally, choosing not to come out does not make someone less queer or less politically radical. In certain cultural settings, queer people must negotiate compromises in order to survive and make their lives livable, often realizing that what Lauren Berlant calls “the Good Life” remains unattainable. Finally, I reflect on the personal, academic, and political potential of autotheory for making sense of lived experience and resisting against systemic oppression.
This conversation breaches the reification and commodification of autotheory across the humanities, and challenges its dominant, Anglocentric definitions. Rather than closing in on autotheory’s exact nature, it reemphasizes instead its historical conditions of emergence and its modes of transnational circulation, as well as the tensions underlying comparative and intercultural analysis of autotheoretical practices. Alex Brostoff’s work has consistently examined and enlivened the intertextual and intersubjective stakes of autotheory as praxis; here, the conversation turns towards the possibility of complicating autotheory’s own genealogies and trajectories, through the study of further archives of experimental self-narrative, and with a focus on current debates in Latin American contexts.
At the heart of Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan’s dynamic and impressively multifaceted volume Autotheories (2025) lies a foundational contradiction. On the one hand, the editors handle autotheory as a genre of writing; while also treating it as a mode of reading on the other. The biggest single strength of the volume is the way it then explores this constitutive ambiguity and the crossing of generic, disciplinary and historical boundaries as the positive precondition in which autotheory emerged. Questions of definition are therefore consciously eschewed in favour of exploring the properties of the form without an attempt at a singular resolution: hence the emphasis on autotheories, in the plural. If the chapters in the collection have one thing in common it is their commitment to exploring the “affordances of the form, its voicing from the subaltern spaces of what is outside the dominant and its opening to yet unwritten futures” (15), so that Brostoff and Cooppan are able to state in the Introduction that if “the turn to an ‘auto-’ appears at odds with acts of collectivity, this, we have argued, is precisely autotheory’s characteristic affordance” (19).
