Abstract
This article considers the centrality of Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts to an English-language proliferation of “autotheory” as the term for a particular genre. I argue that the different forms of “autotheory” these books understand themselves as creating, and the genre they are purported to have consolidated, are particularly generated out of (someone’s) changing gender. In exploring both how the term “autotheory” moves between the two texts as well as critiques of the texts’ narrative tropes, I suggest that we can think about their primary offering not as a theory of gender but as models of writing responsive to and productive of particular affective states. A contribution to thinking about queer generosity emerges in the article’s method of lingering with the generative openings critique also offers.
