“The history of feminism is, in a sense, a history of autotheory,” writes Lauren Fournier in her 2021 book, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. This special issue of Feminist Studies features essays, artworks, and an interview that contribute to these intertwined histories by enacting autotheory and/or reflecting on the development of the field. The volume opens with two essays that explore embodied possibilities for living in a world saturated with violence. Cynthia Belmont reflects on deer hunting as an ecofeminist practice, arguing that vegans and subsistence hunters might find common ground in grappling with the complexities and complicities of our relationships to the land and creatures that enable us to live. Megan Sweeney creates a dialogue among three contemporary autotheorists—Christina Sharpe, Arianne Zwartjes, and Melissa Febos—who draw upon their embodied experiences in reckoning with pervasive forms of racialized, nationalized, and gendered violence. The next five pieces in this special issue center marginalized bodies and care work. Focusing on a difficult period when she was navigating a health crisis and conducting research about murders of Black women, Terrion L. Williamson discusses how reading the work of Audre Lorde renewed her affective relationship to Black feminism, reminding her that it is not just “a theory to be applied” but “a framework for a way of being.” Devaleena Das recounts her devastating experiences as an immigrant mother of color who witnessed the death of her newborn infant. Das’s autotheory illuminates how racist and sexist dimensions of the healthcare system fundamentally shape the biopolitics of visibility, protection, and care. Marshall Azad McCollum, a Bangladeshi-American, reflects on the devaluation of domestic care labor in capitalist societies; while living with his ailing grandmother in Bangladesh, McCollum witnessed how the crisis of care jeopardized the health of both his grandmother and her live-in caretaker. Na Mee’s creative nonfiction explores care work from the dual perspective of a mother whose son is a puzzle she will “never solve” and a grieving daughter who cannot save her dying father in real life or in her dreams. Finally, in dialogue with anthropologist Lyndon K. Gill, Black feminist ethnographer Gina Athena Ulysse interprets a collection of Haitian Kwi (calabash bowls) and Bwapin (fabric-wrapped pine kindling) as a Rasanblaj, a feminist “regrouping against the scattering” that enables viewers to identify and sit with the wounds of slavery. The next four pieces in this special issue highlight questions of method in engaging with and enacting autotheory. In her interview with Megan Sweeney, Arianne Zwartjes discusses the relationships among autotheory, autopolitics, and creative nonfiction, and she offers suggestions for helping students to navigate the ethical complexities of reading and writing autotheory. Conceptualizing autotheory as a “trans method,” Eamon Schlotterback examines how trans scholars use autotheoretical techniques to craft their sense of self, create alternative modes of community, and produce counterhegemonic forms of knowledge. Olivia Ordoñez analyzes Taylor Swift as an “autotheoretical songwriter” who explicitly foregrounds her ongoing process of self-construction through her songwriting, segmentation of her career into distinct eras, and re-recordings of her first studio albums. Kristen E. Nelson adopts autotheory as a method for exploring broader histories through the lens of a single story; by attempting to understand the life of a single woman burned as a witch, she attempts to fathom the loss of the countless women murdered as witches in Early Modern Europe. This special issue concludes with two essays that foreground collaborative methods of generating autotheory. Six long-term friends from different countries—Azza Basarudin, Tina Beyene, Elora Halim Chowdhury, Sharmila Lodhia, Catherine Z. Sameh, and Khanum Shaikh—illustrate the varied ways that stories about preparing and consuming food serve as crucial sites for analyzing home and nation as spaces of attachment. Israeli feminists Amal Ziv and Maya Lavie-Ajayi collaboratively interrogate their own sexual histories in relation to contemporary feminist debates, conceptualizing sexual agency “as a context-dependent and relational experience” that can coexist with “internalized oppressive discourses.”

Megan Sweeney and Judith Kegan Gardiner
Preface
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915905

Cynthia Belmont
Pleasures of the Hunt / We Must Be Creatures: Toward an Ecofeminist Hunting Ethic
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915906

Megan Sweeney
“Brutality and its aftermath”: Autotheoretical Engagements with Violence (Conjunctures)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915907

Terrion L. Williamson
Need that Tastes Like Destruction: Lessons from (the) Lorde on the Occasion of Black Death and Dying
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915908

Devaleena Das
Striving for a Breathable Life: Marginalized Bodies and Corporeal Justice
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915909

Marshall Azad McCollum
Serving the Aging: Navigating Elder Care, Domestic Servitude, and Crisis in a Home Away from Home
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915910

Na Mee
This, right now; 10,000 pieces; The Last Hug
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915911

Lyndon K. Gill and Gina Athena Ulysse
Bwapin Rasanblaj: A Curated Conversation (Art essay)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915912

Arianne Zwartjes, interviewed by Megan Sweeney
“The Contact Zone”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915913

Eamon Schlotterback
Autotheory as Trans Method
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915914

Olivia Ordoñez
“I’m Still Trying Everything to Keep You Looking at Me”: Taylor Swift and the Autotheoretical Construction of Public Selves
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915915

Kristen E. Nelson
Fleshing the Archive of Witches: A Creative/Critical Case Study of Somatic Synecdoche
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915916

Azza Basarudin, Tina Beyene, Elora Halim Chowdhury, Sharmila Lodhia, Catherine Z. Sameh, Khanum Shaikh
What Hungers Call Us Home? Engaging Autotheory Through Food
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915917

Amal Ziv and Maya Lavie-Ajayi
Our Fair Share of Risk-Taking and Bad Sex: A Dialogic Inquiry into Young Women’s Sexual Agency
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915918

Stephanie Spector, Samantha Auerbach, Julie Laut, Lara Caroline Islinger, and Emaline Marie Reyes
News and Views Forum on Dobbs v. Jackson
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915919

Loubna Qutami, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Sherene H. Razack, Evelyn Alsultany, Minoo Moallem, Elora Shehabuddin, and Nadine Naber
News and Views Forum on Gaza
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915923