Confessional Knowing: A critically queer reading of friendships in the letters and journals of modernist women (2022)
This project will make use of unique research knowledge and expertise (Gammel) and specialist archive collections within the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, including life writing materials such as autobiographical accounts, diaries and letters of figures, in particular Gertrude Stein and Florine Stettheimer. It aims to develop a queer/feminist methodology, through a lens of defamiliarization (Palmer) at the convergence of creative and critical scholarship (Braidotti), to analyse relevant primary texts, from the MLC archive, for moments of knowing about friendships between women within the confessional telling. The method(s) will then be extended to published confessional material of modernist figures including Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville West, Violet Trefusis, Alice B. Toklas and Colette. The anticipated co-authored outputs are: a conference paper; a research paper (suitable for submission to a leading feminist publication); an account of the methodology; an open source reading list; a creative response to the material and a workshop.
Writing as Knowing – a creative critical investigation of research by practice through the production of ‘Queer as Friends: a theoretical memoir charting unconventional friendships as feminist activism’ (2019-2025)
This thesis is an intentional assemblage of creative and critical (also known as creative-critical) methodologies. It is an urgent, radical, methodically experimental, and important contribution to the discourse of queering knowledge creation through alternative research methods, redefining the paradigm of academia and smudging the boundaries of feminist, academic, queer, scholarly, margin-dwelling, patriarchy-resisting creative practice.
My research is centred on both creative practice and practice as research. A memoir, Queer as Friends: a theoretical memoir charting unconventional friendships as feminist activism, interweaves confessional, personal and intimate storytelling with experimental form and queer feminist theoretical discourse. In Queer as Friends, I propose a manifesto for unconventional friendships between queer folk and allies, and champion the practice of friendship as queer acts of resistance. I also enact non convention through the experimental narrative. A deliberately non-chronological (but not random or unordered) cartography of micro-chapters comprising an assortment of forms including some not typically adopted for narrative non-fiction. Forms include autobiography, essay, poetry, screenwriting, letter, memo, interview, code, graphic novel and cross-stitch.
Encompassing intimate details, anecdotes and experiences from my own radical, boundary-blurring, hard-to-label friendships with women and gender fluid folk, their disruptive and transformative potential and revolutionary affect will be uncovered and examined. This text stands on the shoulders of the recently emerged niche in creative non-fiction by feminist writers, books and projects that successfully fuse memoir with qualitative research and theoretical discourse, what might be called ‘autotheory’ or autoethnography but could equally be labelled queered memoir.[1]
The project’s critical component is integral to, and closely aligned with, the creative submission. They braid together as a double helix or French plait. Through the appropriation of multiple methods across different research and creative disciplines, I investigate the practice of writing the self as queer feminist methodology in order to address the underpinning question: how can creative writing be treated as research and scholarly practice?
Interrogating the theoretical traditions of Irigaray, Foucault, and Butler and contemporary queer and posthuman autotheorists such as Ahmed, Barad, Braidotti, Halberstam, Haraway, Muñoz and Nelson, the central thesis argues that autobiographical storytelling and auto theory are critical methodologies for queer feminist scholarship and that writing is a queer way of knowing. This culminates in ‘The Quantum Leap’, a queer-creative knowledge creation framework that allows creative practitioners to map the many points of knowledge creation in their practice.
[1] ‘Autotheory’ as coined and exemplified in the following texts: Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (London: Melville House, 2016); Kathryn Bond Stockton, Avidly Reads Making Out (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Michelle Tea, Against Memoir (London: And Other Stories, 2019), and Stacey Holman Jones and Anne Harris, ‘(On the) Body as Book’ in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 8.3 (2019) (pp.76-82).
Widening Research and Participation (wrap) (2018-2019)
Katie is a part of a social research team at the University of Warwick, investigating the role of undergraduate research as a tool to improve educational outcomes for students from widening participation backgrounds. Read about the widening research and participation project here.
Katie M Hall 