'This act of writing produces something of a genealogy of the various notions of writing and text that have circulated within the critical or scholarly domain. It also discusses the convergence of notions of writing with certain ideas from Queer Theory, such as performativity (Butler 1990), that resulted in the emergence of what might be called Queer Writing. The article also acts as an introduction to the works contained in Beyond Australia Queer, a special Queer issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.' (Publication abstract)
'In the mid 1970s, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigiray (among others) famously placed a call for women to write their bodies as a way to break the bonds of patriarchal language structures and create a space for women’s writing by using the form now most commonly known as écriture féminine. For the last three years I have written a book called all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, and what I have discovered is that écriture féminine is not enough. How can écriture féminine describe this particular body, that is genderqueer, and tattooed, and has lost its womb? What if, instead of écriture féminine, there was écriture matière? What if every body, when allowed to write, to tell stories, to speak, was able to enact a form of narrative and civil disobedience, an unerasing of the corporeal from text? This paper is the development of the concept of écriture matière, a call for all bodies to write themselves, as they find themselves, in this moment, now. It is a call to create a generative textual and material space that is anything but exclusionary: a text that matters.'
Research background
'Homosexual activity is a criminal offense under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a code drafted by Lord Macaulay during British rule. Homosexual activity between consenting adults was decriminalised by the Delhi High Court in 2009, but it was overruled by the Supreme Court in 2013. Currently, homosexual sexual activity carries a ten-year sentence in India.' (Publication abstract)
'This act of writing produces something of a genealogy of the various notions of writing and text that have circulated within the critical or scholarly domain. It also discusses the convergence of notions of writing with certain ideas from Queer Theory, such as performativity (Butler 1990), that resulted in the emergence of what might be called Queer Writing. The article also acts as an introduction to the works contained in Beyond Australia Queer, a special Queer issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.' (Publication abstract)
'This act of writing produces something of a genealogy of the various notions of writing and text that have circulated within the critical or scholarly domain. It also discusses the convergence of notions of writing with certain ideas from Queer Theory, such as performativity (Butler 1990), that resulted in the emergence of what might be called Queer Writing. The article also acts as an introduction to the works contained in Beyond Australia Queer, a special Queer issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.' (Publication abstract)