The title of this recording is "Rebekah Galbraith - Rainbow Studies Now". It is described as: Dr Rebekah Galbraith presents at the Rainbow Studies Now symposium, held on 23 November 2023 at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. It was recorded in Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, Kelburn, Wellington on the 23rd November 2023. Rebekah Galbraith is presenting.  Their name is spelt correctly but may appear incorrectly spelt later in the document. The duration of the recording is 15 minutes, but this may not reflect the actual length of the proceedings. A list of correctly spelt content keywords and tags can be found at the end of this document. A brief description of the recording is: Dr Rebekah Galbraith presents at the Rainbow Studies Now symposium, held on 23 November 2023 at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. The content in the recording covers the 2020s decade. A brief summary of the recording is: The presentation delves into contemporary queer literature, focusing on queer autoethnographic writing. Dr. Galbraith utilizes Jack Halberstam's concept of perverse presentism, a historical analysis model, to examine contemporary representations of queer identities. This approach avoids projecting modern understandings onto the past while allowing present insights to interpret historical conundrums. Galbraith explores three key narratives: Paul B. Preciado's "An Apartment on Uranus," Jenn Shapland's "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers," and Selby Wynn Schwartz's "After Sappho." Each text showcases queerness as a cultural journey and underlines the significance of queer self-representation. These works contribute to an expanding corpus of queer and trans counterpublics, challenging the dominant heteronormative paradigm. Preciado's narrative, set against the backdrop of socio-political and techno-scientific changes, calls for a new framework to understand queer existence. Shaplin's memoir recontextualizes Carson McCullers' queerness within their own narrative, addressing unfinished and misremembered aspects of queer history. Similarly, Schwartz's work reimagines the lives of notable women like Lena Poletti, Colette, Virginia Woolf, and Isadora Duncan, offering a modern perspective on past queer lives. The presentation also examines the intersection of queer theory, biography, and fiction, drawing upon Virginia Woolf's ideas and Judith Butler's focus on the materialization of the body and its role in forming identities. It highlights the transformative potential of queer and trans bodies in creating alternative temporalities and narratives. Galbraith's talk culminates in a discussion of queer counterpublics and world-building, as envisioned by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner. This involves reimagining sexual culture beyond the heteronormative framework, with queer culture emerging as a space of self-cultivation and collective memory. The presentation underscores the dynamic, transformative nature of queer identities and narratives, challenging conventional understandings and opening new possibilities for queer literary and cultural analysis. The full transcription of the recording begins:  So, modern fiction, uh, the queer autobiography. Uh, so today, um, I'm, I'm gonna use, uh, a white fella. Uh, uh, uh, today I'm using Jack Halberstam's, uh, model of historical analysis, uh, perverse presentism, uh, as a lens for reading contemporary queer auto neutrality. auto ethnographic writing. Um, why do we caution, uh, against something like queer presentism, right? That act of reading historical representations of queer identity through a contemporary lens, uh, as if we are constantly moving towards an ideal moment of triumph, right? This is the it gets better argument of queer history, that queer experiences are fundamentally oriented towards equality and liberation. Um, and Halberstam's model explicitly, uh, avoids the trap of simply projecting contemporary understandings back in time, uh, but likewise invites us to, quote, apply insights of the present to conundrums of the past. Halberstam introduces this model to explore pre 20th century lesbianism and gender. Uh, so perverse presentism aligns itself to that Foucauldian idea of history of the present, while avoiding the pitfalls of literary historians who seek to find what they already think they know. At its core, perverse presentism is an application of what we do not know in the present to what we cannot know about the past. So, with that in mind, uh, my paper will examine new approaches to queer autoethnographic writing in three contemporary narratives, uh, Paul B. Preciado's An Apartment on Uranus, uh, Jen Shaplin's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, and Selby Wynn Schwartz's, uh, After Sappho. Each text catalogues and organises queerness as a cultural exploration, demonstrating the critical value of queer models of self representation. Reflecting on Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's claim for a new public knowledge system of queer intimacies and experiences, these are texts that add to a growing scholarship of queer and trans counterpublics produced outside the dominant framework of the heteronormative. Uh, Proshoda chronicles his gender transition amid global socio political and techno scientific changes, uh, mobilizing his call for a new cognitive framework to negotiate another order of queer existence. As an archivist, Chaplin's memoir relocates Carson McCullough's queerness within her own, memorializing the unfinished and misremembered. Similarly, Schwartz's speculative history after Sappho reimagines and fragments the lives of dozens of women, Lena Poletti, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, at the turn of the 20th century, exploring past queer lives through a modern lens. In considering the limits of presentism, this paper will explore the broader questions of an exclusively queer literary history, uh, and the critical and cultural value of the intervening queer subject. Um, contemporary readings of camp iconography, such as my autobiography of Carson McCullers, and after Sappho problematized the notion of an explicitly queer literary, queer historiography, a subject recently explored in Hugh Lemmy and Ben Miller's Bad Gays, a Homosexual History, quote, Why do we choose to remember and why do we choose to forget? In this way, Preciado's text models Halberstam's perverse presentism, teasing that notion of disidentification as a tenant of the queer cultural experience, a Uranian ideal where his body is transgressive, trans historical, a connective sequencing of form and memory. His central conceit, an apartment on Uranus, is the locus of queer potentiality existing beyond all taxonomies of modern identification, right, impossible, unattainable, and revolutionary. So the title of this paper, Modern Fiction, um, lends itself from an essay by Virginia Woolf, uh, first appearing in 1919 as Modern Novels in the Times Literary Supplement, uh, and later revised, uh, for the first Common Reader series in 1925, about the same time that Mrs. Dalloway comes out. Um, across her novels and short stories and criticism, Woolf threads this very intricate argument for a new way of reading and indeed writing, uh, writing and indeed reading, um, the unknowable, right? Socratic unexamined life in modern fiction wolf expresses dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary writing and reminds young novelists that quote There is no limit to the horizon and nothing and that nothing no method No experiment even of the wildest is forbidden, but only falsity and pretense For Wolfe, the unknown and uncircumcised, uncircumscribed spirit of the novelist is a lens into the role of the biographer, right? A craftsman, not an artist. She says, his work is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between. Of course, Wolfe's novel Orlando, a biography famous with sapphists the world over, is the longest love letter in history. It's the West, right? It's a prime example of this betwixt and between. The novelist as biographer, um, is an important character I kind of want us to think about. I would like us to think and hold well central ideas around biography and fiction. The craftsman of writing a life, uh, both past and present, uh, and her posthumous claim that biography is, quote, only at the beginning of its career. So shifting away from the boundaries between fact and fiction on the page, I want to consider how the queer and trans body might construct itself between these forms of writing. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler shifts their focus to the materialization of the body and the limits of sex, noting that bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves. But this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of the boundary itself, appears to be quite central to what bodies are, end quote. In an apartment on Uranus, Preciado's narrative of queer cultural production demonstrates that critical relationship between queer and trans bodies, and their integral role in developing alternate temporalities. I'm going to talk about his chapter, Orlando on the Road, as a Preciado's way of raising that Wolfian notion of an atemporal biographer recording the self, the figure of the autobiographer who chronicles the crossings of these imaginary boundaries of form. For Preciado, it is Wolfe's Orlando, the way the character transcends the discursive boundaries of sex, and Wolfe's distinctive use of the inhuman, pre personal biographical form that let him consider the making of Paul. What happens in the narrative life, narrative of a life when it is possible to change the main character's sex are foreshadowed. And from there he launches into an awareness of the difficulty of being alive to what happens, to caution against that Wolfian solitude. The inherent mistake of presentism, right, centering one's own history and transformation, and therein losing sight of new forms of knowledge making and post capitalist production invented under our very eyes. In Sex in Public, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner describe the cultural and critical impact of radical queer counterpublics and world building and the changed possibilities of identity that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or privileged example of sexual culture. Heteronormative world making is connected to the market and the state and thereby central to the accumulation and reproduction of capital, where queer culture is one of self cultivation. My trans body does not exist, argues Preciado, in the administrative protocols that guard the status of citizenship. As a way of being, to write from an apartment on Uranus is Prishadho staking Berlin and Waller's claim that an increased generation of queer knowledge and world making will support forms of effective, erotic and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory and sustained through collective activity. This is summed up by Preciado's charge that he is not speaking of history here, but rather of your lives, of his, of today. Like Wolfe constructing Orlando by endlessly making and remaking the body of Paul across a lifetime, uh, Preciado's call for a utopian gender positions his corporeal memory Uh, as symptomatic of this cultural retelling. Um, to borrow here from Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, where the gendered body is endlessly made, remade, and unmade through the language of a desire, right? This elliptical reconstruction of the self as separative and unknown. Uh, Pachaudo similarly characterizes the trans body as a site of cultural production, reappropriating historical narratives of persecution and deviance. Where Nelson delights in the stack of cocks at her partner Harry Dodge's bachelor pad, Prosciutto's Chronicle of the Crossing speaks to what Nelson's lover considers to be true, that quote, once we name something, we can never see it the same way again. Likewise, an apartment on Uranus achieves as a catalogue of post queer embodiment is the excision of visibility, representation, the right of self determination and political recognition from the binary categories of self sexual difference, right, the Uranian descent of the sex gender system. The trans body is as interminable as it is unnameable, where, much like that stack of cocks, every transmogrification of Paul's corporeal form has its meaning renewed by its use. Right? The trans body does and does not exist. So where does Let Leave text that explicitly engage with archival material? Uh, and to what extent does presentism mediate our reading of the archive as an organized catalog of identity, as experience, uh, as well as a queer corrective to the sexual politics of heteronormative order? Gin Chaplin's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers deliberately muddies the boundaries of autobiography as a genre. Uh, arguing that in order to tell another person's story, a writer must make that person a version of herself. Uh, this is Chaplin's formal excuse, right? For finding a way to inhabit the misremem misremembered life of Carson McCullers and the deliberate fashioning of his self that hybridizes the writer as subject. Uh, Chaplin's portrait of McCullers is self sustaining. It's an exercise in cruising the stacks. An intern at the Harry Ransom Center, a writer's and artist's Uh, Archive at the University of Texas. Chaplin discovers love letters written to McCullers from Anna Marie Clarke Schwarzenbach, a Swiss heiress with whom McCullers had an affair. Uh, what follows is Chaplin's analysis of how McCuller's, uh, impossible longings and self described feelings of unrequited love, uh, inform her own queer self discovery. For Chaplin, McCuller's is a proxy for her own closeting, the unacknowledged truth of her own identity. But to write of queer self discovery, of queerness in retrospect, but the subject as a version of the self, uh, is the antithesis to the archive as a living standardized response to that information gap. Writing of a library fever in lesbian memoir and the sexual politics of order, Ben Nichols isolates this problematizing of queerness as exclusion in the archive by posing that following question. Quote, when it is lesbian lives that effect a system for categorizing and ordering, what are we to make of queer theory's aversion to the category? Writing about and through Carson McCullers as a version of her own self, Chaplin demonstrates how a presenter's representation seemingly undermines the act of archiving and collecting, uh, the very tangible records of history she is paradoxically, uh, working to preserve. Um, so I'm, I'm wondering here, how is it that we are perpetually stuck in a cycle of reading for repression in a text like my autobiography of Carson McCullers, where the phantom of lesbian desire shelves the subject of McCullers and instead issues Chaplin, uh, as a post queer reader instead. The act of writing queerness, uh, of queer lives and experiences, uh, positions history as a collective performance, inextricable from the present. Where the act of writing into being an explicitly queer cultural experience produces this hybridized, speculative literary kinship. And after Sappho, Selby Wynne Schwartz maps the queer lines and lineages of a post Sapphist textual voice. In a bibliographic note, Schwartz considers the text as both a work of fiction, as much as a hybrid of imaginaries and intimate non fictions, of speculative biographies, as to have no recourse to a category at all. Moreover, Schwartz returns to the redrafting of Orlando and habits Wolfe as she skirts the impeccable lawns of Cambridge, arrives at the present again and again where Chloe famously likes Olivia. But fiction cannot be rushed into the future, says the Sibylline speaker, and Orlando troubles the boundaries of genre, a new biography composed beyond the limits of fiction. It was as mercurial in mood and ample in form as Orlando themselves. And every time Orlando woke, there were many more lives. To read Orlando at the present time is to communicate through a lineage of silence and censorship, and Schwartz orients the central conceit of a shared collective embodiment, uh, through fragmented encounters with highly fictionalized sketches of Sappho, Colette, Romaine Brooks, Radcliffe Hall, Isadora Duncan, and more. These variations of Sappho voyage out across time, wherein the act of remembering on the page one noun is always thinking of another, refusing to forget her. Um, the textual relations, uh, between the many man manifestations of Sappho, um, I think clearly illustrate Sarah Ahmed's work on queer phenomenology, right? The politics of disorientation over time, and the potential for quest for spatial disruption and disorder. So, I'd like to finish, um, uh, on collective, uh, performance all because fucking Virginia Woolf wrote my biography in 1928. So, this year, Whānau Māramā New Zealand International Film Festival screened Prishardo's adaptation of Woolf's novel, Orlando, uh, my biographie politique. Uh, Prosciutto opens the film, someone once asked me, why don't you write your biography? He responds, because fucking Virginia Woolf wrote my biography in 1928. Who are the contemporary Orlandos? asked the film. Prosciutto's embodiment of Orlando is a collective performance of 26 trans and non binary cast members aged 8 to 70, where quote, Life is not a biography, but a series of stages, consists of metamorphosis of one's self, letting one's self be transformed by time, to become not just other, another, but others. Right, going back to, to Paul Recroix, that idea of, of un autre pour les autres, right? An other for another. Um, My Biographie Politique, uh, is precisely what Wolfe had in mind when she wrote Modern Fiction, right? Art free from the constraint of form. What Preciado's queer orgy of Orlando's embody is a future being, possible not in fact, but in fiction, and because of fiction. Thank you. The full transcription of the recording ends. A list of keywords/tags describing the recording follow. These tags contain the correct spellings of names and places which may have been incorrectly spelt earlier in the document. The tags are seperated by a semi-colon: 2020s ; Berlin ; It Gets Better ; Judith Butler ; Nelson ; New Zealand International Film Festival ; Rainbow Studies Now: Legacies of Community (2023) ; Rebekah Galbraith ; Sappho ; Texas ; Virginia Woolf ; artist ; autoethnographic writing ; autoethnography ; binary ; biography ; boundaries ; building ; camp ; capital ; career ; censorship ; change ; citizenship ; collective ; counterpublics ; cruising ; cultural transformation ; culture ; desire ; difference ; discovery ; dominant ; encounters ; equality ; exclusion ; exercise ; experiment ; feelings ; film ; film festival ; future ; gender ; heteronormativity ; heterosexual ; history ; homosexual ; identity ; intern ; kinship ; knowledge ; language ; lesbian ; letter ; liberation ; library ; love ; lover ; memoir ; movement ; narrative ; other ; performance ; persecution ; perverse presentism ; politics ; queer ; queer literature ; queer theory ; reading ; recognition ; records ; representation ; repression ; scholarship ; self determination ; sex ; silence ; support ; time ; trans ; transgressive ; transition ; truth ; university ; visibility ; voice ; women ; work ; writing. The original recording can be heard at this website https://www.pridenz.com/rainbow_studies_now_rebekah_galbraith.html. The master recording is also archived at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand.  For more details visit their website https://tiaki.natlib.govt.nz/#details=ecatalogue.1107379. Rebekah Galbraith also features audibly in the following recordings: "Welby Ings - Rainbow Studies Now keynote". Please note that this document may contain errors or omissions - you should always refer back to the original recording to confirm content.