Panel #7 Session 4
Thursday 30 November - 13:30
Building 25, Teal Room
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Chair: Diana Clarke
Beyond Trauma: Queering Biography
- Atul Joshi
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Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando might as well be her biography of Vita Sackville-West. She knew a ‘straight’ account of her beloved couldn’t be written, that a queering of biography was needed if she wanted to fully describe and celebrate their love. Prefiguring the work of Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey, and inspired by Lytton Strachey, Woolf suggests what a ‘new’ biography might look like in her eponymous 1927 essay The New Biography: “facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded,” through “writing about people… as though they were at once real and imagined”. With Orlando she anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage: “it is with fragments such as these that we must do our best to make up a picture of Orlando’s life.” For me, drafting my own creative thesis about trans family member Alison, these are guides to what a new, queer biography might look like. Avoiding the tropes of trauma and misery that are a feature of so much writing about queer lives, speculation and the ‘brightening’ of facts allow me to envision a life rooted in queer joy – a Muñozian Utopia. My proposal is to present an account of this journey of a creative work in progress, drawing from the critical writings of Woolf, Deleuze and Guattari, Muñoz, Brien and Lindsey, to envision a tentative model for a queer biography — one constructed from speculative fragments, the whole tending towards joy.
Born in Myanmar of Indian parents, Atul migrated to Australia as a child. Since completing a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at UTS, he has been shortlisted for the Saturday Paper’s 2020 Donald Horne Prize, the 2022 Newcastle Writers’ Festival’s Fresh Ink Prize and long listed for the 2023 Mascara Varuna Residency. He has published in The Big Issue, Westerly, Island, Seizure, Ricepaper Magazine, Portside Review, Peril Magazine, Sydney Review of Books and Growing up Queer in Australia. He has also read at Queerstories.
‘Saying a lucid yes’: an ecstatic transbody writes
- Quinn Eades
University of Melbourne
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In a 1998 interview published in Derek Attridge's Acts of Literature Derrida makes the point that he "almost always writes in response to solicitations or provocations"¹. He moves on to ask us what literature is, where it comes from, and what we should do with it. Later in the interview he says that he "dreams of a writing that would be neither philosophy nor literature, nor even contaminated by one or the other...", and that he dreams of a text that can produce an addressee capable of saying a lucid yes². Every one of these moments (of course, and there are so many more) is both a provocation and a solicitation.
I am no stranger to being provoked or solicited, or to how often I find myself taking things up/on/in/through (a text message to a friend two nights earlier: I don't think I can not-write this...). In this paper I say yes to the dream of writing and then again yes to being-writing and being-read. I read Cixous's and Derrida's Veils³ with attention, in the dirt, crickets nearly cancelling tinnitus, saying a lucid yes to orifices and openings, tunnellings in body and text; the story of my transbody learning how to be ecstatic (who knew I could go that far, that often, that much; my pleasure so often exceeding my limits). Each time I am broken open reading Veils I take this break as a provocation. I give these breaks, these lines, to my transbody, and say write. Write a transbody in love in pleasure in bliss in kinship in connection, in the under grounds, and we do.
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1 Derek Attridge (ed), '"This Strange Institution Called Literature": An Interview with Jacques Derrida' in Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature, 1992: Routledge, NY, p. 41.
2 Ibid, p. 73
3 Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, 2001: Stanford University Press, California.
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Quinn Eades is a writer, researcher, editor, and award-winning poet. He is the author of all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body (2015), and Rallying (2017). He is currently working on two volumes: an essay collection titled Collaboration as Love, and is the body home, a trans autobiography.
Triple threat: (Screen)writing queer adaptations in the academy
- Dante DeBono
University of South Australia
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Screenwriting as creative practice research has only recently begun to pick up traction, lagging behind its counterparts like prose and poetry that are often regarded as more complete or valued texts. Even as written pieces, screenplays are intrinsically linked to the audio-visual medium of screen productions, which results in a largely standardised format that informs perceptions of screenwriting as more of an industry convention than a creative process. If screenplays are dismissed as blueprints for a final product, then a screen adaptation only emphasises this devaluing of its merit by being viewed as derivative and thus held to different standards. To disregard the value of adaptations based on their status as a secondary text lacks consideration for the critical potential of adaptation as a creative process. In the same way that adaptations can and should be thought of through a deconstructive lens that interrogates assumptions of their worth and role in popular culture, queer theory questions the heteronormative ideologies that permeate social constructs. The multiplicity of methods that can employ a queer approach to critique allow for continued consideration of the broader sociocultural context these works find themselves in. As with any narrative that takes on a minority perspective or voice, it provides an opportunity to engage in the story of a marginalised group. This combined trio of seemingly subaltern methodologies presents the opportunity to engage in a deconstructive approach to creative writing practices within the academy from multiple axes.
Dante is a PhD candidate at the University of South Australia with the goal of promoting social inclusivity and equality through work focussed on diversifying queer representation in research and creative outputs. Her current thesis is focused on the queer potential of revisionist adaptations in fiction through screenwriting-based practice-led research that has seen the development of a queered modernisation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. She has been on the central committee for the Gender, Sex and Sexualities Conference since 2021, and is an advisory team member for the UniSA Oral History Hub.