Genrequeer: gender, genre, and disability in contemporary autobiographical lyric memoirs

• Main Author: Chong, Catherine May Deen
• Other Authors: Graham John Matthews
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Medical humanities; English literature; Poetry; Queer theory; Crip theory; Disability studies; Contemporary poetics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/179690
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis brings together methodologies from disability, crip, and queer theory to propose a case for the genrequeer as a heretical lineage of contemporary writing about illness. Tracing the development of the genrequeer in contemporary and experimental works of narrative, this thesis traverses a number of contemporary political and social issues to foreground the multiple entanglements between experimental forms of writing, gender non-conformity, and disability. This work aims to transform the fantasy of the discreteness of categories, not through the production of epistemological correctives, but instead, through the means of their disruption and dissolution via multiplicity. Through the application of fields of study such as queer theory, disability studies, and medical humanities to histories of experimental writing, this thesis offers a provocative reimagining of what can be signalled by phenomenological disruptions to the structures of genre. By resisting dominant structures of testimony, such as the ‘Restitution Narrative’ (Frank, 1995, p. ix), the ‘Chaos Narrative’ (Ibid.), the ‘Quest Narrative’ (Ibid.) or the monomyth referred to as the ‘hero’s journey’ which Joseph Campbell conceptualised as representing ‘the rites of passage’ (Campbell, 1949, p. 30) defined by ‘separation—initiation—return’ (Ibid.), authors of contemporary genrequeer narratives demonstrate how styles of genre non-normativity can devise queercrip interventions into autobiographical structures of telling outside those monopolised by ablebodied expectations of form. Frequently marketed and described as ‘genre-bending memoirs’, ‘lyric essays’, ‘autotheory’, ‘autotexts’, and ‘experimental prose poetry’, authors of contemporary genrequeer illness narratives rely on subversions of normative literary modes of genre to bear witness and engage in phenomenological forms of utterance. This dissertation offers two arguments for the value of the genrequeer, firstly the experimental side of the work pushes against legibility as a way to evade the institutional demand for recognition and visibility in classical genres, which is to say that the antithesis of the genrequeer is the genre of the autobiography which emerges as a kind of liberal narrative of progress or growth. Secondly, the argument is that the genrequeer stands for collective liberation, anchored in principles of disability justice which extend more widely. The latter points to an “alternative imagery” through “non-position” and “counter-narrative”. While the first argument is an anarchic view that is resistant and fugitive, the second is communal and collective. This dissertation underscores the revolutionary, power-building impetus of experimental work that might be otherwise effaced. After an introduction which reviews literature and circumscribes this space, successive chapters reach back to the 1970s to establish an early phase of emergent cripqueer spaces, next centring the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s as a pivotal moment of politicised activism, followed by the final substantive chapter which moves into the 2000s and 2010s by considering biotechnical artistic experimentation, such as hormone experimentation in concert with new relational structures that refract heteronormative tropes of biocertification, medical-industrial hegemony, and state domination.