Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice

Abstract

In autotheory as contemporary feminist practice, artists, writers, philosophers, activists, curators, and critics use the autobiographical, first person, and related practices of self-imaging (Jones, Self/Image 134) to process, perform, enact, iterate, subvert, instantiate, and wrestle with the hegemonic discourses of “theory” and philosophy. The term “autotheory” circulates specifically in relation to third wave and fourth wave feminist texts, such as American writer Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts and American filmmaker and art writer Chris Kraus's I Love Dick even as the act of theorizing from the first person is well-established within the genealogies of feminism; as a post-1960s practice it takes on a particularly conceptual and performative valence. This article serves as a historicization of what we are referring to in the present as “autotheory,” with auto theoretical antecedents having been referred to as “critical memoir,” “theoretical fiction” (Hawkins 263), “life-thinking” (Samatar), and “fiction theory” (Brossard). I turn my attention to “Sick Woman Theory” and “Sad Girl Theory” as twenty-first century examples of auto theoretical feminist practices that span out across social media. I consider how these post-internet practices of making space for sickness and sadness in auto theoretical ways can be understood in relation to the imperatives of intersectionality and the complications of neoliberalism in the present.