Trans and Queer Autotheories with Salomé Honório, Alex Brostoff, Vilashini Coopan, and p. feijó
Autofiction and autotheory have become increasingly recognizable forms of critical experimentation for trans and queer authors, whose engagements with the limits of genre raise questions about the ties between lived experience, knowledge-production, and critical speculation. They have also become increasingly commodified within the literary and academic market alike.
Join us for this conversation, where Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Coopan (co-editors of Autotheories, the MIT Press, 2025), Salomé Honório (co-editor of “Texts and Practices in Contemporary Trans and Queer Autotheory”, Compendium #9, 2026) and pê feijó (author of the “autotheoretical essay-poem” Episódios de Fantasia e Violência, Orfeu Negro, 2024) offer joint reflections on the shapes and stakes of experimental trans and queer self-narrative today.
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Salomé Honório is a poet and researcher based in Lisbon, Portugal. They are a co-founding member of Quir Research Hub, a collaborator with the Center for Comparative Studies, and a member of the Urban Transitions Hub (ICS - University of Lisbon). Their work departs from a core commitment to the transdisciplinary and intersectional critique of dominant economies of representation, especially with regards to race, gender, and sexuality. Their current research focuses on autofictional and autotheoretical works by trans and queer authors across Lusophone and Anglophone contexts, and they most recently edited “Texts and Practices in Contemporary Trans and Quer Autotheory” (Compendium - A Journal of Comparative Studies, #9, Summer 2026), with Lamiae Bouquentar (Uni. of Toronto). They are the author of the poetry books Lábio/Abril (Traveller, 2015), fox, closet & fist (Face Press, 2023, 2nd ed.) and Raposina (Douda Correria, 2024).
Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University and a visiting scholar at the University of Lisbon’s Centre for English Studies. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they study how trans and queer cultural production negotiates and recasts the relationship between self-figuration and decolonial critique. Their first book, The Autotheory Effect: Hemispheric Encounters with the Grammar of Relation, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press. They are co-editor of two volumes: Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) with Vilashini Cooppan and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2027) with rl Goldberg.
p. feijó is a writer, researcher, and militant whose work is devoted to monstrosity as a theory and praxis of minoritarian struggles. Her works include the books Bichxs de Merda: Aristóteles, Fêmeas e Outros Monstros De-Generativos (maio maio, 2023) and Episódios de Fantasia e Violência (Orfeu Negro, 2024). She has authored prefaces to the Portuguese editions of Paul B. Preciado’s Countersexual Manifesto (Edições Unipop, 2015; Orfeu Negro, 2019) and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (maio maio, 2025), and is an ongoing collaborator with periodicals such as Electra and Umbigo. She holds an MA from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.
Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford UP, 2009), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on comparative and world literature, postcolonial studies, memory studies, the theory of the novel, critical theory, biofiction, and autotheory. Her work appears in the journals symploke, Gramma: A Journal of Theory, Comparative Literature Studies, Public Culture, PMLA, Concentric, Qui Parle, Critical Times, ASAP Journal, as well as in various edited volumes.
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