Queer and Trans Memoir at the End of the World: Chase Joynt and Zoe Whittall in Conversation
Moderated by Kaitlin Blanchard
In a recent rallying cry to resist “too late capitalism” (“ecocide has happened; it’s too late”) Anna Kornbluh opines that the fervent desire to be “fans and critics,” to party until the lights come up in the face of omnicrisis, and the “everybody gets a personal essay!” banality of asking the internet “am I the asshole?” (r/AITA), are all instances of capitalism’s fetish of immediacy. In other words, you can’t imagine a future when you keep mistaking the red pill of immersion for the work of building solidarity and collectivity.
But for queer and trans communities that have always been freighted by alienation of the closet and the stigma of shame, and who have found resistance in pleasure and excess, in the bar, the club, and the bathhouse, writing the self has always been in some ways a collective middle finger to the violence of normative social structures of support and kinship, “we’re here, we’re queer.”
Join us for a conversation with Zoe Whittall and Chase Joynt on their recent autofictions, the proliferation of what has been called “autotheory,” (queer) celebrity, the rise of derivative media, and the role of queer and trans artists in the face of climate collapse and (queer) fascisms. In other words, as the meme says, “get in loser, we’re seizing the means of production.”
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