Autotheory? Locating the self in feminist research

Friday 24 May 2024, 2pm – 3pm

Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities

All welcome

Speaker: Dr Elliot Evans (University of Birmingham)

Moderators: Yoshiyuki Ishikawa (University of Oxford), Isaac James (University of Oxford)

How do we situate ourselves as researchers, and what place does or should ‘the self’ have in feminist research? To what extent do we focus on ourselves and to what extent on others? Embracing the title of this series, Feminist Thinking, this talk offers a way into considering how we approach research as feminists, focusing on feminist methodologies and the position of the feminist researcher. I revisit questions of reflexivity in response to the increasing popularity of autotheory in feminist, queer and trans research, offering a critical exploration of autotheory as a genre and as a (feminist) methodology.

Biography:
Elliot Evans is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, and author of Queer Permeability: The Body in French Thought from Wittig to Preciado (2020). Elliot is concerned with the varied constructions of sexuality and gender across cultures, engaging variously with queer, feminist and transgender theories. Their work examines the biopolitical management of bodies and illness, and the ways in which this is elaborated through writing and visual production. Their current research project is a comparative analysis of the visual language of HIV/AIDS across four national contexts: Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Haiti, Québec.

This event supported by Green Templeton College