AbstractThis chapter examines Paul B. Preciado’s use of life writing as a means of producing cultural memory about trans peoples’ encounters with the mental health profession. Using the framework of testimonial injustice developed by Miranda Fricker, it argues that Preciado’s 2020 book Can the Monster Speak? is an example of life writing that seeks to reposition trans people as holders of knowledge about gender and sexuality who have been wronged by the medical profession’s use of pathologising discourses that designate trans desires and subjectivities as illnesses requiring treatment. The chapter examines Preciado’s use of the aesthetic strategies of intertextuality and ventriloquism to narrate and contest the position of trans people as patients. It closely reads Preciado’s sustained interweaving of the characters and themes of the writing of Franz Kafka with the figure of the monster, which has a rich history in trans life writing and theory. The chapter shows how life writing can be a means of producing cultural memory from a subjugated position, in this case by repositioning trans subjects from having a place within the history of medical discourse as patients to being agents of memory who narrate the complex history of interactions between trans people and the medical profession.

Abstract:This article considers zine making as a form of independent literary production that can offer new insights into the understanding of creativity in literary studies and the humanities more broadly. It situates zines as a form of literary writing, reading, and distribution that cannot be incorporated into dominant accounts of literature or creativity because of their ephemerality. The article examines case studies by Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and the poet Hakim to demonstrate the unique forms of creativity zine making enacts. The author argues that the study of independent media requires the development of new, creative methodologies in cultural scholarship that can expand our understanding of the uses of creativity beyond understanding it as a practice that generates forms of value that can be transferred to other areas of civic life.

This article considers zine making as a form of independent literary production that can offer new insights into the understanding of creativity in literary studies and the humanities more broadly. It situates zines as a form of literary writing, reading, and distribution that cannot be incorporated into dominant accounts of literature or creativity because of their ephemerality. The article examines case studies by Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and the poet Hakim to demonstrate the unique forms of creativity zine making enacts. The author argues that the study of independent media requires the development of new, creative methodologies in cultural scholarship that can expand our understanding of the uses of creativity beyond understanding it as a practice that generates forms of value that can be transferred to other areas of civic life.

“Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly from it”Autofiction at the Intersection of Self, Sociality, and Mediation Anna Poletti (bio) Like many other novels that work with lived experience, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This (2021) raises questions about the auto as much as it relies on the fiction of stable selfhood. What, exactly, does it mean to have an auto now? What use is the auto? (Or as Sheila Heti put it in her auto-fiction, How Should a Person Be?) In the aftermath of postmodern literary fiction’s often ironized engagement with these questions, and the rise of memoir as an influential literary genre, recent autofiction reinvigorates the novel as a genre for charting the fraught intersection of interiority and sociality. While novels can deal with almost any topic, they are still one of our most reliable means of reflecting on the perennial call and complex challenges of being with others. As Judith Butler argues in Giving an Account of Oneself (2003) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2010), the knot many of us face in sociality is not a narcissistic attachment to the ego, but that humans are social animals who need to rely on knowledge of the other to organize collective living. A degree of consistent selfhood grounds sociality, politics, and ethics. In light of this, how do we develop, maintain, and communicate a sense of who we are? What can we take as reliable knowledge of others? And what roles can individuality play, and what values can we assign it, in the context of the social? These questions permeate many contemporary political and social events: from young people who cannot vote asserting their right to influence climate policy, to the position of the immunocompromised during the pandemic, to the fate of people in borderlands and detention centers seeking refuge. Identity labels such as youth, medically vulnerable, and refugee may appear to offer the stability people need to make claims on the community, but they also come with the risk of subsuming the individual into a category that misrecognizes who they are in ways that harm their dignity. No One Is Talking about This is presented in two distinct sections that explore this tension from a feminist angle. Moreover, it explores the terrain between individuality and collectivity as an explicitly mediated one. The novel examines sociality as entangled with mediation. The first part of the narrative [End Page 23] enacts and depicts the internet as a diffractive technology. The unnamed protagonist is something of an internet celebrity—living deep in “the portal”—engulfed in the fast tempo of its fluidity, where “attention is holy.” Presented to the reader in fragments, this is a chaotic, socially and affectively rich life in which the protagonist is constantly brought (too?) close to others, taking up their preoccupations as her own, merging her desires and fears with others’: “Strange, how the best things in the portal seemed to belong to everyone.” The second section of the novel follows the protagonist into an experience that seems wholly resistant to the dynamic flow of mediation which characterizes the first section. It begins innocently enough: the protagonist will become an aunt. However, her sister’s child is diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder (Proteus syndrome) in utero, a life-threatening condition for mother and child. Traveling to Ohio to be with her sister, the protagonist agonizes over the threat to her sister’s life and struggles with her sister’s transition from unique individual to “pregnant woman” in a conservative healthcare regime. Realizing that none of the healthcare professionals will even mention termination as an option while outlining the risks to her sister’s life, the protagonist is overcome with concern: What she worried for was not just her sister’s life but her originality. She loved Star Wars so much, for instance, that she had walked down the aisle to “The Imperial March.” Would the impulse to walk down the aisle to “The Imperial March”—which seemed the essence of survival itself, the little tune we hummed in the dark—would that make it out of whatever was happening alive? Such...

Graphic Medicine's Possible FuturesReconsidering Poetics and Reading Erin La Cour (bio) and Anna Poletti (bio) Since its coinage in 2007 by medical practitioner and comics artist Ian Williams, graphic medicine has steadily gained traction as an umbrella term for comics that explore healthcare issues, the theoretical discourse these comics engender, and the study of comics as expressive communicative tools. Embedded within comics studies, graphic medicine interacts with the interdisciplinary medical humanities, which applies insights from the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts to the study and practice of medicine. Primarily promoted as a means of engendering compassion in practitioners in training, the goal of the medical humanities is: to reconceptualize health care, through influencing students and practitioners to query their own attitudes and behaviors, while offering a nuanced and integrated perspective on the fundamental aspects of illness, suffering, and healing. In Aristotelian terms, medical humanities aim to improve health care (praxis) by influencing its practitioners to refine and complexify their judgments (phronesis) in clinical situations, based on a deep and complex understanding (sophia) of illness, suffering, personhood, and related issues. In this respect, medical humanities have a more applied function than the humanities as they are traditionally defined in the academy. (Shapiro et al. 192–93) Moving on from the use of comics in medical institutions, which predominately take the form of simple, top-down didactic infographics on posters and in patient brochures, graphic medicine aims to expand the benefits of using comics in both healthcare training and information dissemination. While the visual shorthand of infographics is easy to comprehend and can be helpful in providing patients with important information that orients them in relation to a specific illness or disability and its treatment, what they lack is an in-depth exploration of how illness and disability, as well as healthcare systems and statistics, can make one feel. Graphic medicine aims to redress this lack by focusing on how the complex affordances of the comics medium can provide subjective insights into experiences of various forms of illness and disability (Williams, "Autography" and "Graphic Medicine"; McNicol; Squier and Marks; Green and Myers). Emphasizing and examining the communicative potential of the juxtaposition of incongruent texts and images, verbal and visual metaphor, color, line, and pacing through page layout, paneling, and guttering, the study and production of graphic medicine aims to explore and expose the subjective experiences of health and healthcare systems that may be difficult for both practitioners and patients to understand or explain in either verbal or visual language alone. [End Page 1] The past decade has seen a proliferation of graphic medicine comics, produced in large part by individuals aiming to relay their personal experience living with a particular illness or disability. These works, along with those from the perspectives of doctors, nurses, social workers, carers, and family members, echo calls in the medical humanities for the urgent need for different understandings and expressions of illness and disability than those found in conventional medical discourse. Whereas medical institutions largely focus on diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, graphic medicine takes a bottom-up approach that reveals how communication is not always easy or straightforward. With its focus on the patient as an identity that is constituted by pathology and the body, medical discourse often ignores the encounter between healthcare professionals and patients as a culturally bounded and interpersonal one, influenced by factors such as cultural context, language, gender, class, and ethnicity. To counter this tendency, graphic medicine discourse promotes comics as an important medium to depict interactions between individuals, their loved ones, a wide array of healthcare workers, and the healthcare system as scenes of intercultural, interdiscursive, and intergenerational encounter. Graphic medicine focuses on "taking back the experience of somatic dysfunction from medical authority and talking back to medical discourse" (Couser 348). Taking cues from narrative medicine, which has long advocated for the use of reading literature and writing reflectively as part of medical training and treatment (Milota et al.; Charon; and Williams, "Graphic Medicine"), a handful of medical schools have begun encouraging their students to read comics to gain insights into what their (future) patients may be experiencing. Comics about various forms of illness and disability now often...

More Flailing in Public Anna Poletti (bio) There has been an outpouring of tributes to Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, in response to their passing in June this year. Some tributes, like those published in The Nation or n+1 (Butler et al.; Bordowitz et al. ), focus on Berlant's intellectual legacy, often prioritizing the importance of Cruel Optimism as an analytic frame for understanding the contemporary moment. Others, such as those published on the blog of the journal Berlant coedited, Critical Inquiry (Ferguson and Brown), are closer to forms of digital life writing. The personal, often intimate and confessional, tone of many of these tributes seem entirely appropriate ways of memorializing a thinker, teacher, interlocutor, collaborator, and (for some) friend, who was a leading figure in developing a rigorous approach to studying a cluster of related phenomena: affect, publics, intimacy, sexuality, gender, genre, and form. Many of the tributes are a testament to what Berlant helped us think and say about the work of the intellectual ( "Affect is the New Trauma"; "Genre Flailing"), and how Berlant's way of engaging with their colleagues was often intellectually generative, as well as personally surprising or unsettling. In what follows, I offer my perspective on the worlding Berlant engaged in (Poletti and Rak 262; Berlant and Warner), and offer a sketch of some of the elements for worlding they left behind. For me, Berlant's publications and their way of speaking with colleagues enacted and theorized core tensions that preoccupy lifewriting studies: what it means to be a person in public—sometimes alone, sometimes in a collective, sometimes in search of collectivity. Always thinking from, and beyond, psychoanalytic insights into the disorganizing experience of desire (largely through object-relations), Berlant explicated the kinds of stories about the good life that permeated American culture, and explored what happened to people's belief in culture, politics, and themselves when they tried to live those narratives, or discovered those narratives were structurally unlivable ( The Female Complaint; Cruel Optimism ). Berlant's early work on trauma ("Trauma and Ineloquence" ) and their interviews (with Jay Prosser, and with Julie Rak and me) are the places where the relevance of their deep attention to the politics of "fantasies of the good life" are most clearly connected to lifewriting scholarship. Margaretta Jolly's special issue of Biography on "Life Writing and Intimate Publics," published ten years ago, shows us how productive Berlant's theory of the importance of being and feeling intimate in [End Page 2] public can be for studying life writing, particularly online. A thinker preoccupied with genre ( The Female Complaint ; "Genre Flailing"), Berlant was ambivalent about autobiography per se. They made that ambivalence available as a tool, rather than a judgment. When they invited Julie Rak and me to present at the University of Chicago, they responded to my speculative paper, an attempt to connect Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of the periperformative utterance to the importance of the performative in theorizing of life writing, by asking openly: Isn't all autobiography periperformative? Luckily, I had read enough Berlant by then to know that their use of all was not an attempt to collapse everything together in order to control or dismiss it, but an invitation to shift the object or my position in relation to it. In a footnote to a later publication, Berlant summarized the periperformative as "Sedgwick's term for the context-extending effects of performative actions" ("Genre Flailing" )—a statement that usefully condenses a core element of Sedgwick's concept, while also being an apt descriptor of Berlant's intellectual legacy. Through a slow unfolding of specific genres that give form to Americans' investment in the good life (such as the couple form and the nation), Berlant's scholarship (a performative action) radically extended the applicability of feminism and queer theory's interest in ideologies of proper desire. When we interviewed Berlant the day after our presentations, they spoke from their commitment to creating deep context through attention to "the scene," and with characteristic honesty about the goals they had set themselves as a writer and thinker with their blog, Supervalent Thought. For...

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg’s life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of ‘youth’ in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg’s activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg’s life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun’s argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg’s argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

This entry develops a definition of literature as an identity technology by bringing together theories of identity formation as a process of identification and introjection, with thinking about reading as a materially grounded process in which readers encounter identities in the form of characters and narrators. The essay critically situates the terms “identity” and “technology” in the study of literature, media, and culture in order to argue that at the linguistic, symbolic, and material level, literature can be used as a means for inscribing and reinscribing identity at the individual and collective level. Drawing on ways of reading literature from autobiography studies and queer theory, this article is about how to read and think about literature as a mechanism through which identity is formed, negotiated and renegotiated, inscribed, and made public. The case studies utilized in this entry are the opening and closing essays of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s important work of literary theory, Tendencies. Sedgwick’s theorization and enactment of reading as a generative, queer practice is brought together with a close reading of her reflections on her own identity and the variety of techniques she uses to situate to her reader to elucidate the utility of thinking literature as a technology used in the ongoing work of identity.

This essay examines the absence of mobile phone technology from the narrative of No Friend but the Mountains in order to reflect on the centrality of mobile digital technology for the intellectual work the book undertakes. Examining a key scene from No Friend but the Mountains where telecommunications technology is represented as a limited resource within Manus Prison, it draws on media theory and life writing theory to argue that the affordances of mobile digital technologies enabled the emergence of a new, collaborative form of life writing that both affirms the value of an individual life, while also making powerful claims regarding the collective suffering and dehumanization at the heart of Australia’s mandatory detention policy.

This article takes the form of a speculative reading of a selection of objects and cardboard boxes from Andy Warhol's monumental artwork,Time Capsules(1974-1984) based on research on theTime Capsulesundertaken at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2014. TheTime Capsulesconsists of 612 containers (most of them identical cardboard boxes) filled with objects from Warhol's life. In this article, I draw on comics studies, queer theory, and the theory of autographics to consider how and why theTime Capsulesmight be read as an artwork that stages an encounter with intimate interiors. These intimate interiors are multiple: spanning the materiality of the work itself, the enclosure of mementos, objects, and ephemera within the mundane autobiographical technology of the cardboard box, and the reader's own interior world which they must draw on to find a path through the vast array of objects that make up the work. The reading offered in this article follows the trace of affect and intimate relationality - sexuality, familial relations, friendships and love - across the work. It argues that theTime Capsulespowerfully demonstrate the role of objects in the construction, maintenance and memorialisation of intimate connections.

This introduction to a forum of essays on Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison situates the book as a work of life writing and political theory, arguing it is a landmark moment in the evolution of life writing as a cultural, social, political, and epistemological practice. It introduces the essays that make up the forum, and situates Boochani's text as a direct challenge to the genre of refugee memoir and its privatizing modes of reading.

The importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics In an age where our experiences are processed and filtered through a wide variety of mediums, both digital and physical, how do we tell our own story? How do we “get a life,” make sense of who we are and the way we live, and communicate that to others? Stories of the Self takes the literary study of autobiography and opens it up to a broad and fascinating range of material practices beyond the book, investigating the manifold ways people are documenting themselves in contemporary culture. Anna Poletti explores Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules , a collection of six hundred cardboard boxes filled with text objects from the artist’s everyday life; the mid-aughts crowdsourced digital archive PostSecret ; queer zine culture and its practices of remixing and collaging; and the bureaucratic processes surrounding surveillance dossiers. Stories of the Self argues that while there is a strong emphasis on the importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics, mediation is just as important in establishing the credibility and legibility of life writing. Poletti argues that the very media used for writing our lives intrinsically shapes how we are seen to matter.

Reviewed by: Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel by Michael A. Chaney Anna Poletti (bio) Michael A. Chaney. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. UP of Mississippi, 2017, 195 pp. ISBN 978-1496810250, $65.00. Many of us who study and teach life writing have found the rise of the memoir in comics form an exciting phenomenon to observe. Across literary and cultural studies, influential texts such as Maus, Fun Home, and Persepolis have prompted a renewed interest in accounting for the unique power of autobiographical storytelling and presented scholars with the challenge of reckoning with a new textual form. Michael A. Chaney's Reading Lessons in Seeing sits at the intersection of a media-specific theory of comics and the study of [End Page 399] autobiography, arguing that reading autobiographical comics requires more—from critics, teachers, students, and readers—than a glancing familiarity with the complexities of life writing or the comics form. Chaney demonstrates that in reading autobiographical comics we learn to read anew. Chaney's central premise is that comics themselves teach us how to read them. These pedagogical moments are staged using a range of techniques Chaney elucidates across five chapters concerned with mirror scenes, the figure of the child, games and other non-narrative forms of play, extradiegetic panels that present the comic autobiographer at work, and the possibility of communitas that reckons with the history of racial violence. Reading Lessons in Seeing is full of careful, nuanced, and revelatory close readings that demonstrate how the combination of the comics form with autobiographical content generates an entirely distinct textual encounter. One of the strengths of this approach is that these chapters focus on moments of braiding between the diegetic and extradiegetic fields of the text in which the autobiographical acts as a punctum and as chimera. In my experience of teaching autobiographical comics, these are the moments to which the strongest and most engaged students are drawn when introduced to autobiographical comics in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Such students want to understand what is communicated by Art Speigelman's self-portrait where he sits at his drawing table wearing a mouse mask with the bodies of dead mice at his feet and a guard tower out his window. Chaney's work helps us read such moments, which are undeniably compelling yet difficult to describe. His book will be a valuable resource for teaching, and for supporting the independent research projects of undergraduate and graduate students. In these readings Chaney teaches us how to identify and consider the seemingly impossible balance comic autobiographers strike between artifice and truth. The grounding of the book in Chaney's own teaching reminds us of the importance of the classroom as a space for the scholar to think and learn alongside their students. In this work it leads to numerous clarifications of the complex work of form and genre, positing comics as, among other things, "a set of self-reflexive, visual statements uttering life and inner life in brazenly non-realistic tones" (25). In his close readings that support statements such as the one above, Chaney utilizes Gillian Whitlock's conceptualization of "autographics" and Hillary Chute's careful examination of women's comics in Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. The scholarly originality comes from connecting these theories directly to psychoanalysis in order to argue for the formal specificity of comics. In his chapter on mirror scenes, framed perhaps unsurprisingly by Lacanian psychoanalysis, the "formal operations of the medium, as well as its formal unconscious" are considered to analyze "not just [End Page 400] the subjects talked about in graphic novels but the models of subjectivity that do the talking" (25). While the exploration of a text's unconscious may put off those readers who dismiss the utility of a psychoanalytic approach, Chaney convinced me of the generative possibilities for interpretation and reading such a frame can yield. For Chaney, the form of comics refers to "the method rather than the content of comics" (7)—and thus what the method displaces, as well as what it makes explicit, must be accounted for. Chaney's...

ABSTRACT “DystopiAbramović” responds to a performance initiated by Marina Abramović using bodies of the public in silent performance. We trace the haunting of that performance by forms of collective embodiment that characterize Australia's political reality: carceral immigration policies, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Australia as a refuge for Jews fleeing Europe, and late capitalism.

This essay originates out of our shared interest in genres and media forms used for identity practices that do not cohere into a narrative or a fixed representation of who someone is. It takes the current heightened visibility of drag as a mode of performance that explicitly engages with identity as a product materialized—but not completed—by the ongoing process of performance. We consider the new drag, which we define below, as a form of playing with identity that combines bodily practices (comportment and use of voice) and adornment (make-up, clothing, wigs, and accessories) with an array of media (photography, live performance, social media and television). Given the limited space available, we will not be engaging with the propositions made during earlier feminist and queer thinking that drag is not inherently subversive and may reinscribe gender and race norms through their hyperbolic recitation (Butler 230-37; hooks 145-56). While we think there is much to be gained from revisiting these critiques in light of the changes in conceptualisations of gender in queer subcultures, we are not interested in framing drag as subversive or resistant in relation to the norms of masculinity and femininity. Instead, we follow Eve Sedgwick’s interest in reparative practices adopted by queer-identified subjects who must learn to survive in a hostile culture (“Paranoid”) and trace two lines of analysis we identify in drag’s new found visibility that demonstrate the reparative potential of automedia.At time of writing, RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) has truly hit the big time. Pop icon Christina Aguilera was a guest judge for the first episode of its tenth season (Daw “Christina”), and the latest episode of RuPaul’s All-Stars season three spin-off show was the most-watched of any show in its network’s history (Crowley). RuPaul Charles, the producer and star of RPDR, has just been honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, decades after he began his career as a drag performer (Daw “RuPaul”). Drag queens are finally becoming part of American mainstream media and drag as an art form and a cultural practice is on its way to becoming part of discourse about gender and identity around the world, via powerful systems of digital mediation and distribution. RPDR’s success is a good way to think about how drag, a long-standing performance art form, is having a “break out” moment in popular culture. We argue here that RPDR is doing this within an automedia framework.What does automedia mean in the context of drag on television and social media? We understand automedia to be about the mediation of identity when identity is both a product of representation and a process that is continually becoming, expressed in the double meaning of the word “life” as biography and as process (Poletti “Queer Collages” 362; Poletti and Rak 6-7). In this essay we build on our shared interest in developing a critical mode that can respond to forms of automedia that explore “the possibility of identity in the absence of narration” (Rak 172). What might artists who work with predominantly non-narrative forms such as drag performance show us about the ongoing interconnection between technologies and subjectivities as they represent and think through what “life” looks like, on stage and off?Automedia names life as a process and a product that has the potential to queer temporality and normative forms of identification, what Jack Halberstam has called “queer time” (1). We understand Halberstam’s evocation of queer time as suitable for being thought through automedia because of their characterisation of queer as “a form of self-description in the past decade or so … [that] has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (2). Queer time, Halberstam explains, comes from the collapse of the past and shaky relation to futurity gay men experienced during the height of the American AIDs crisis, but they also see queer time, significantly, as exceeding the terms of its arrival. Queer time could be about the “potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (2). Queer time, then, evokes the possibility of making a life narrative that does not have to follow a straight line or stay “on script,” and does not have to feature conventional milestones or touchstones in its unfolding. If queer time can be thought alongside automedia, within drag performances that are not about straight lives, narrative histories and straight time can come into view.Much has been written about drag as a performance that creates a public, for example, as part of a queer world-building project that shoots unpredictably through spaces beyond performance locations (Berlant and Warner 558). Halberstam’s shift to thinking of queer time as an opening of new life narratives and a different relation to time has similar potential when considering the work of RPDR as automedia, because the shift of drag performance away from clubs, parades and other queer spaces to television and the internet is accompanied by a concern, manifested in the work of RuPaul himself, with drag history and the management of drag memory. We argue that a concern with the relationship between time and identity in RPDR is an attempt to open up, through digital networked media, a queer understanding of time that is in relation to drag of the past, but not always in a linear way. The performances of season nine winner Sasha Velour, and Velour’s own preoccupation with drag history in her performances and art projects, is an indicator of the importance of connecting the twin senses of “life” as process and product found in automedia to performance and narration.The current visibility of drag in popular culture is characterised by a shifting relationship between drag and media: what was once a location-based, temporally specific form of performance which occurred in bars, has been radically changed through the increased contact between the media forms of performance, television and social media. While local drag queens are often the celebrities (or “superstars”) of their local subcultural scene, reality television (in the form of RPDR) and social media (particularly Instagram) have radically increased the visibility of some drag queens, turning them into international celebrities with hundreds of thousands of fans. These queens now speak to audiences far beyond their local communities, and to audiences who may not have any knowledge of the queer subcultures that have nurtured generations of drag performers. Under the auspices of RPDR, drag queens have gained a level of cultural visibility that produces fascinating, and complex, encounters between subcultural identity practices and mainstream media tropes. Amongst her many tasks—being fierce, flawless, hilarious, and able to turn out a consummate lip sync performance—the newly visible drag queen is also a teacher. Enacting RuPaul’s theory of identity from his song title—“We’re all born naked and the rest is drag” (“Born”)—drag queens who in some way embody or make use of RuPaul’s ideas have the potential to advance a queer perspective on identity as a process in keeping with Judith Butler’s influential theory of identity performativity (Butler 7-16). In so doing they can provide fresh insights into the social function of media platforms and their genres in the context of queer lives. They are what we call “new” drag queens, because of their access to technology and digital forms of image distribution. They can refer to classic drag queen performance culture, and they make use of classic drag performance as a genre, but their transnational media presence and access to more recent forms of identification to describe themselves, such as trans, genderqueer or nonbinary, mark their identity presentations and performance presences as a departure from other forms of drag.While there is clearly a lot to be said about drag’s “break out,” in this essay we focus on two elements of the “new media” drag that we think speak directly, and productively, to the larger question of how cultural critics can understand the connection between identity and mediation as mutually emergent phenomena. As a particularly striking practitioner of automediality, the new drag queen draws our attention to the way that drag performance is an automedial practice that creates “queer time” (Halberstam), making use of the changing status of camp as a practice for constructing, and mediating identity. In what follows we examine the statements about drag and the autobiographical statements presented by RuPaul Charles and Sasha Velour (the winner of RPDR Season Nine) to demonstrate automediality as a powerful practice for queer world-making and living.No One Ever Wins Snatch Game: RuPaul and TimeAs we have observed at the opening of this essay, queer time is an oppositional practice, a refusal of those who belong to queer communities to fall into step with straight ideas about history, futurity, reproduction and the heteronormative idea of family, and a way to understand how communities mark occasions, conceptualize the history and traditions of subcultures. Queer time has the potential to rethink daily living and history differently and to tell accounts of lives in a different way, to “open up new life narratives,” as Halberstam says (2). RuPaul Charles’s own life story could be understood as a way to open up new life narratives literally by constructing what a queer life and career could mean in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. His 1995 memoir, Lettin It All Hang Out, details RuPaul’s early career in 1980s Atlanta, Georgia and in New York as an often-difficult search for what would make him a star. RuPaul did not at first conceptualize himself as a drag star, but as a punk musician in Atlanta and then as part of the New York Club Kid community, which developed when New York clubs were in danger of closing because of fear of the AIDS epidemic (Flynn). RuPaul became adept at self-promotion and image-building while he was part of these rebellious punk and dance club subcultures that refused gender and lifestyle norms (Lettin 62-5). It might seem to be an unusual beginning for a drag star, but as RuPaul writes, “I always knew I was going to be star [but] I never thought it was going to be as a drag queen” (Lettin 64). There was no narrative of mainstream success that RuPaul—a gay, gender non-binary African-American man from the American Midwest—could follow.Since he was a drag performer too, RuPaul eventually “had an epiphany. Why couldn’t I [he] become a mainstream pop star in drag? Who said it couldn’t be done?” (Workin’ It 159). And he decided that rather than look for a model of success to follow, he would queer the mainstream model for success. As he observes, “I looked around at my favorite stars and realized that they were drag queens too. In fact every celebrity is a drag queen” (Lettin 129). Proceeding from the idea that all people are in fact drag artists—the source of RuPaul’s aformentioned catch-phrase and song title “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag” (“Born”), RuPaul moved the show business trajectory into queer time, making the “formula” for success the labour required of drag queens to create personae, entertain, promote themselves and make a successful living (and a life) in dangerous work environments—a process presented in his song “Supermodel” and its widely-cited lyric “You better work!” (“Supermodel”). The video for “Supermodel” shows RuPaul in his persona as Supermodel of the World, “working” as a performer and a member of the public in New York to underscore the different kinds of labour that is involved, and that this labour is necessary for anyone to become successful (“Supermodel” video).When RuPaul’s Drag Race began in 2010, RuPaul modelled the challenges in the show on his own career in an instance of automedia, where the non-narrative aspects of drag performance and contest challenges were connected to the performance of RuPaul’s own story. According to one of RuPaul’s friends who produces the show: “The first season, all the challenges were ‘Ru did this, so you did this.’ It was Ru’s philosophy” (Snetiker). As someone who was without models for success, RuPaul intends for RPDR to provide a model for others to follow. The goal of the show is the replication of RuPaul’s own career trajectory: the winners of RPDR are each crowned “America’s Next Drag Superstar,” because they have successfully learned from RuPaul’s own experiences so that they too can develop their careers as drag artists. This pattern has persisted on RPDR, where the contestants are often asked to participate in challenges that reflect RuPaul’s own struggles to become a star as a way to “train” them to develop their careers. Contestants have, like RuPaul himself, starred in low-budget films, played in a punk band, marketed their own perfume, commemorated the work of the New York Club Kids, and even planned the design and marketing of their own memoirs.RPDR contestants are also expected to know popular culture of the past and present, and they are judged on how well they understand their own “herstory” of the drag communities and queer culture. Snatch Game, a popular segment where contestants have to impersonate celebrities on a queer version of the Match Game series, is a double test. To succeed, contestants must understand how to impersonate celebrities past and present within a camp aesthetic. But the segment also tests how well drag queens understand the genre of game show television, a genre that no longer exists on television (except in the form of Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy), and that many of the RPDR contestants are not old enough to have seen, performing witty taglines and off-the-cuff jokes they hope will land in a very tight time frame. Sasha Velour, the winner of season nine, won praise for her work in the Snatch Game segment in episode six because, acting on advice from RuPaul, she played Marlene Dietrich and not her first choice, queer theorist Judith Butler (RuPaul’s). Sasha Velour was able to make Dietrich, a queer icon known for her film work in the 1920-1940s, humorous in the game show context, showing that she understands queer history, and that she is a skilful impersonator who understands how to navigate a genre that is part of RuPaul’s own life story. The queer time of RuPaul’s narrative is transmitted to a skill set future drag stars need to use: a narrative of a life becomes part of performance. RPDR is, in this sense, automedia in action as queens make their personae “live,” perform part of RuPaul’s “life” story, and get to “live” on the show for another week if they are successful. The point of Snatch Game is how well a queen can perform, how good she is at entertaining and educating audiences, and how well she deals with an archaic genre, that of the television game show. No one ever “wins” Snatch Game because that is not the point of it. But those who win the Snatch Game challenge often go on to win RPDR, because they have demonstrated improvisational skill, comic timing, knowledge of RuPaul’s own life narrative touchstones and entertained the audience.Performative Agency: The Drag Performance as Resource for Queer LivingVelour’s embodied performance in the Snatch Game of the love and knowledge of popular culture associated with camp, and its importance to the art of drag, highlights the multifaceted use of media as a resource for identity practices that characterizes drag as a form of automedia. Crucially, it exemplifies the complex way that media forms are heavily cited and replayed in new combinations in order to say something real about the ways of living of a specific artist or person. Sasha Velour’s impersonation of Dietrich is not one in which Velour’s persona disappears: indeed, she is highly commended by RuPaul, and fans, because her embodiment of Dietrich in the anachronous media environment of the Snatch Game works to further Velour’s unique persona and skill as a drag artist. Velour queers time with her Dietrich in order to demonstrate her unique sensibility and identity. Thus, reality TV, silent film, cabaret, improvisation and visual presentation are brought together in an embodied performance that advances Velour’s specific form of drag and is taken as a strong marker of who Sasha Velour is.But what exactly is Sasha Velour doing when she clarifies her identity by dressing as Marlene Dietrich and improvises the diva’s answers to questions on a game show? This element of drag is clearly connected to the aesthetics of camp that have a long tradition in gay and queer culture. Original theories of camp theorized it as a practice of taste and interpretation (Sontag)—camp described a relationship to the objects of popular culture that was subversive because it celebrated the artificiality of aesthetic forms, and was therefore ironizing. However, this understanding of camp does not adequately describe its role in postmodern culture or how some queer subcultures cultivate the use media forms for identity practices (O’Neill 21). In her re-casting of camp, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues:we need to [think of camp] not in terms of parody or even wit, but with more of an eye of its visceral, operatic power: the startling outcrops of overinvested erudition; the prodigal production of alternative histories; the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, lost, or leftover cultural products; the richness of affective variety; and the irrepressible, cathartic fascination with ventriloquist forms of relation. (Sedgwick The Weather 66)This reframing of camp emphasises affect, attachment and forms of relation as ongoing processes for the making of queer life (a process), rather than as elements of queer identity (a product). For Sedgwick camp is a practice or process that mediates queerness in the context of a hostile mainstream media culture that does not connect queer ways of living with flourishing or positive outcomes (Sedgwick “Paranoid Reading” 28). In O’Neill’s account, camp does not involve attachment to the diva as a fixed identity whose characteristics can be adopted in irony or impersonation in which the individual disappears (16). Rather, it is the diva’s labour—her way of marshalling her talent to produce compelling performances, which come to be the hallmark of her career and identity—that is the site of queer identification. What RuPaul wittily refers to as a drag queen’s “charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent” (the acronym is important), O’Neill refers to as the diva’s “performative agency”—the primary “power to perform” (16, emphasis in original). This is the positive power of camp as form of automediation for queer world making: media forms provide resources that queer subjects can draw on in assembling a performance of identity as modes of embodiment and ways of being that can be cited (the specific posture of Dietrich, for example, which Velour mimics) and in terms of the affect required to marshal the performance itself.When she was crowned the winner of season nine of RPDR, Sasha Velour emphasised the drag queen’s performative agency itself as a resource for queer identity practices. After being announced the winner, Velour said: “Let’s change shit up. Let’s get all inspired by all this beauty, all this beauty, and change the motherfucking world” (Queentheban). This narrative of the world-changing power of the beauty of drag refers to the visibility of the new drag queens, who through television and social media now have thousands of fans across the world. Yet, this narrative of the collective potential of drag is accompanied by Velour presenting her own autobiographical narrative that posits drag as an automedial practice whose “richness of affective variety” has been central to her coming to terms with the death of her mother from cancer. In interviews and in her magazine about drag (Velour: The Drag Magazine) Velour narrates the evolution of her drag and her identity as a “bald queen” whose signature look includes a clean-shaven head which is often unadorned or revealed in her performances as directly linked to her mother’s baldness brought on by treatment for cancer (WBUR).In an autobiographical photo-essay titled “Gone” published in Velour, Velour poses in a series of eight photographs which are accompanied by handwritten text reflecting on the role of drag in Velour’s grieving for her mother. In the introduction, the viewer is told that the “books and clothes” used in the photos belonged to Velour’s mother, Jane. The penultimate image shows Velour lying on grass in drag without a wig, looking up at the camera and is accompanied by nineteen statements elucidating what drag is, all of which are in keeping with Sedgwick’s reframing of camp practices as reparative strategies for queer lives: “Drag is for danger / Drag is for safety / Drag is for remembering / Drag is for recovering.” Affect, catharsis, and operatic power are narrated and visually rendered in the photo-essay, presenting drag as a highly personal form of automediation for Velour. The twentieth line defining drag appears on the final page, accompanied by a photograph of Velour from behind, her arms thrown back and tensile: “Drag is for dressing up / And this is my mother’s dress.”Taken together, Velour’s generic and highly personal descriptions of drag as a process and product that empowers individual and collective queer lives define drag as a form of automedia in which identity and living are a constant process of creativity and invention “where ideas about the self and what it means to live are tested, played with, rejected, and embraced” (Rak 177).Velour’s public statements and autobiographical works foreground how the power, investment, richness and catharsis encapsulated in drag performance offers an important antidote to the hostility to queer ways of being embodied by an assimilationist gay politics. In a recent interview, Velour commented on the increased visibility of her drag beyond her localised performances in “dive bars” in New York:When Drag Race came on television I feel like the gay community in general was focussed on […] dare I say, a kind of assimilation politics, showing straight people and the world at large that we are just like everyone else and I think drag offered a radical different saying [sic] and reminded people that there’s been this grand tradition of queer people and gay people saying ‘actually we’re fabulously different and this is why.’ (PopBuzz)Velour suggests that in its newly visible forms outside localised queer cultures, drag as a media spectacle offers an important alternative to the pressure for queer people to assimilate to dominant forms of living, those practices, forms of attachment and relation Halberstam associates with straight time.ConclusionThe queer time and performative agency enacted in drag provides a compelling example of non-narrative forms of identity work in which identity is continuously emerging through labour, innovation, and creativity (or—in RuPaul’s formulation—charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent). This creativity draws on popular culture as a resource and site of history for queer identities, an evocation of queer time. The queer time of drag as a performance genre has an increasing presence in media forms such as television, social media and print media, bringing autobiographical performances and narratives by drag artists into new venues. This multiple remediation of drag recasts queer cultural practices beyond localised subcultural contexts into the broader media cultures in order to amplify and celebrate queerness as a form of difference, and differing, as automediality.ReferencesBerlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (Winter 1998): 547-566.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. 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Historically, auto|biography studies has had sporadic contact with media studies. This is because the question of the aesthetic, psychological, social, and political formations of life narrative ha...