DEI, Queerness, the Anthropocene!

SO grateful to @rebekah.sheldon for inviting me to present as part of her amazing PLANETARY FUTURES series @iubloomington. I presented a 45-minute performance piece entitled "Decadence, Enervation, Insomnia: A Queer DEI for the Anthropocene" -- in a BAR, the delightful BISHOP. I only ever now want to do performance pieces in bars. The audience was so generous, and my hosts spectacular exemplars of graciousness, patience, good humor, and probing intelligence. HIGHLIGHT of the year so far!

Upcoming in Warsaw!

Delighted to be giving an American Studies Colloquium lecture at the University of Warsaw next week!

"The Minima Moralia of Autotheory: New Reflections on Damaged Life'

Thursday, April 24, 2025
at 4:45 p.m.
For more info: https://www.asc.uw.edu.pl/event/april-24-the-minima-moralia-of-autotheory-new-reflections-on-damaged-life/

Since the publication in 2015 of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, the genre that has come to be known as autotheory has risen as one of the privileged genres — if not the privileged genre — of the American literary establishment. A hybrid genre, autotheory sifts insights from critical theory through the lived experiences of individuals, often from traditionally and systemically marginalized groups in US society. Some recent critics have criticized autotheory as a predominantly marketplace phenomenon driven by often highly over-educated and culturally elite writers seeking new audiences (beyond the academy) for their work. In this view, autotheory seems little more than a sophisticated form of navel-gazing produced by writers seeking to capitalize on the narrative spectacularization of their marginality.

Working with and against this critique, Alexander argues in this talk that autotheory is better understood as the most recent manifestation of a form of critique traceable to Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Formally comparable in its aphoristic style, autotheory shares with Adorno’s work a worrying over the “splinters” of contemporary existence as capable of providing larger insights into both late capitalist and fascist cultural and structural formations. Alexander draws on some recent autotheoretical texts as well as his own experience as a writer of autotheory to illuminate how autotheory, at its best, is never simply an indulgence in navel gazing but rather an acute attention to to the movement of capitalistic and fascistic forms of anti-life — an attention equally redolent with the desire to root in embodied experience forms of resistance necessary for imagining and living in our world otherwise.

JA Coming Up! Event and Appearance Lineup / Details coming soon!

Saints & Sinners Festival. March 28 – 30. New Orleans, LA. Event lineup TBA.

Forum for the Academy and the Public. March 7. University of California, Irvine. “A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.” Jonathan Alexander in conversation with KSR.

CCCC. April 10. Baltimore, MD. “Collaboration (Intentional and Serendipitous) as Wayfinding and Remix” (with Karen Lunsford and Carl Whithaus)

American Studies Colloquium Series. April 24. University of Warsaw. Warsaw, Poland. “A Minima Moralia of Autotheory: New Reflections from Damaged Life.”

Planetary Futures Series. April 30. Indiana University. “A Queer DEI for the Anthropocene: Decadence, Enervation, Insomnia.”

The Visual Turn -- Why I Started Writing about -- and Making -- Art

My art practice — ranging from inks, watercolors, and acrylics to photography and collage — really only emerged during the pandemic, when I needed (and had the privileged opportunity) to occupy my time when not in a series of Zoom meetings.  I had always loved art, and I regularly read artists' biographies for pleasure, so I found myself buying a sketch pad and trying my own hand at art making.  I was hooked.  

I also found myself wanting to write more and more about art, and I was really drawn to artists such as David Wojnarowicz and Herve Guibert who were both artists and writers.  I produced some pieces on some of my other favorite artists (Catherine Opie, Nayland Blake, Darrel Ellis) for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I now have a forthcoming book from Fordham UP on queer visual artists and writers, called DAMAGE: MEDITATIONS ON QUEER ART.  While I was working on that book, I was also continuing my art practice and even took a course on queer photography through the International Center for Photography.  The course and the practice of photography aided me in conceptualizing my work on other artists, especially queer photographers such as Opie, Mark Morrisroe, and Laura Aguilar.  

I post some of my own artwork on my Instagram account, and was delighted when a gallery, the XYZ Gallery of photography in Melbourne, announced a show on queer self portrait photography and invited me to participate.  I'm totally an amateur so feel very honored to have work shown alongside some professional artists!

As to the work itself, I have for a long time been fascinated by the self-representation of queer subjects.  Queer people have frequently come of age at times and in environments in which we are told by others who we are, including how sinful, sick, or "damaged" we are as queer people.  And yet, many queer folks have demonstrated creative resourcefulness in taking control of their own self-representation.  I try to explore some of this dynamic in my own critical work, in the monograph WRITING DESIRE, as well as in my own creative nonfiction, such as DEAR QUEER SELF: AN EXPERIMENT IN MEMOIR.  Being able to explore queer creative energy in visually rich work has been a true delight — and one that has inspired me to think more robustly about the connections between written and visual forms of self-expression.