The Brown Center invites you to our Faculty Spotlight on Thursday, October 13th at 12:00 PM on Zoom. The spotlight series is a showcase of research, creative inquiry, and other scholarly engagement of the campus community. Stop by and learn about the research of our talented Stetson community!
Dr. Teresa Carmody – Assistant Professor of English
Department of English
TO READ A BODY OPEN: AUTOTHEORY AND THE ARCHIVE
Combining personal narrative with readings of primary texts and archival research, To Read a Body Open is a collection of autotheoretical essays about coming into creative and political self-awareness via readings of several writers whose work has influenced that process: Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Tee Corinne, Clarice Lispector, and Kathy Acker, to name a few. The essays are experimental in their form and methods: I am positioning my body as a living archive alongside official and unofficial archives of these writers. Drawing on the felt experience of being in the archive, the essays formally reflect readings of these writers’ works and lives. Throughout, I encounter their art and the archive as ritual and as reckoning with the unstable place of queer female embodiment and the ideological underpinnings of my racialized subjectivity. These essays offer a fierce, intimate look at our reading practices as embodied life experiences, based on positionality.
In this talk, I will offer some of my thinking around autotheory and the archive, as well as a short performance from an essay in progress.
Teresa Carmody’s writing includes fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Her books include Maison Femme: a fiction (2015) and The Reconception of Marie (2020); her essays and fiction have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, Autofocus, and more. teresacarmody.com / @troseistrose on IG