Post-Millennial

Cultures of Fear
in Literature
Post-Millennial
Cultures of Fear
in Literature:

Fear, Risk and Safety

Edited by

Mustafa Kirca and Adelheid Rundholz

Post-Millennial Cultures of Fear in Literature: Fear, Risk and Safety

Edited by Mustafa Kirca and Adelheid Rundholz

This book first published 2024

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2024 by Mustafa Kirca, Adelheid Rundholz and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-0364-0313-0

ISBN (13): 978-1-0364-0313-3
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .............................................................................................. vii

Adelheid Rundholz and Mustafa Kirca

Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1

Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences: Affective
Autotheoretical Accounts of Fear as Critical Engagements with White
Supremacy and Heteropatriarchy
Yola Gómez and Paddy Farr

Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 24

From Frightful Monsters to Monstrous Fear: The Evolution of Zombies
from Horror to Social Criticism
Adelheid Rundholz

Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 44

Going Beyond Risk Society from an Affirmative Posthumanist
Perspective in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army and Megan Hunter’s
The End We Start From
Mahinur Gözde Kasurka

Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 66

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Critique of the Creation of Fearful Nonhuman Subjects
for a “Safer” World in Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun
Yağmur Sönmez Demir

Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 91

Fear Fallacies: Everyday Rhetoric of Fear in Ian McEwan’s Post-
Millennial Novels
Elif Toprak Sakız

Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 115

“Mysterious Emotions”: The Fear of Artificial Friends in Ian McEwan’s
Machines Like Me and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
Anastasia Logotheti
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 141

Rising Fear, Populism, and Social Media Surveillance: Post-Brexit
Britain in Sam Byers’s Perfidious Albion
Deniz Kırpıklı

Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 164

Nuclear Threat and State Oppression in The Genius by Howard Brenton
Elvan Karaman Mez

Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 185

Culture of Fear in a Liquid Modern World: Peripeteia of Western Society
in Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath
Mert Güçlü

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 207

Family as a Precarious Community in Rachel Cusk’s In the Fold
Buket Doğan

Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 231

Language of Fear and Safety: Brick Lane and The Few
Mustafa Güneş

Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 251

Reframing Identities and Cultural Politics in Post-9/11 Contemporary
Pakistani Literature: H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy and Mohsin Hamid’s
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Hira Naz

Conclusion .............................................................................................. 274

Constructions of Fear as Subject or Object
Hywel Dix
 INTRODUCTION

ADELHEID RUNDHOLZ AND MUSTAFA KIRCA

In one of his essays “Novelist as a Vocation,” Haruki Murakami, the world-

wide famous Japanese writer, speculates that people started reading his
works during times of upheaval in their respective societies and lives and
feels that the way he writes may serve as a calming point of reference when
things seem to fall apart. If he is right, his intuition is an unsettling indication
of the state of our world because he is now read around the globe in more
than fifty languages. Turning on the news on any given day, as we know,
brings images of war, (environmental) disaster, devastation, and violence.
Among the many issues one might focus on, Russia’s war against Ukraine
or the current mass slaughter in Gaza has led to a sense that the geopolitical
stability that people had lived with for decades has been pushed off balance
and makes the near and not so near futures uncertain and frightful.
Ulrich Beck (1944-2015) and Manfred Furedi (b. 1947), German and
Hungarian-Canadian sociologists, respectively, have spent their academic
careers investigating the uncontrollability and uncertainty in contemporary
life and how these factors have led to changes in how societies and
individuals perceive and evaluate notions about risk and safety. Furedi, in
particular, holds that judgments about risk and safety are driven by an
increased feeling of fear and that the current fear(s) are essentially different
from how people felt fear in the past. Featuring theoretical and analytical
approaches with insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, the chapters
in this volume are anchored in the work that was done by Beck and Furedi
and explore the implications and applications of their ideas through analyses
of literary works, music, poetry, drama, film, and television in a variety of
contemporary subjects and genres ranging from the literature of the
COVID-19 Pandemic memoire and the zombie film, the American series
The Walking Dead, to nonhuman subjects, risk society and risk narratives,
and covering such works as Sam Byers’s Perfidious Albion, Sarah Hall’s
The Carhullan Army, Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, Monica
Ali’s Brick Lane, Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath, Howard
Brenton’s The Genius, Rachel Cusk’s In The Fold, Hakan Günday’s The Few,
H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist,
viii Introduction

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Klara And The Sun, and Ian
McEwan’s Saturday, Solar, Machines Like Me, and his novella, The
Cockroach.
In the volume’s opening chapter, “Through the Transmutation of my
own Personal Experiences: Affective Autotheoretical Accounts of Fear as
Critical Engagements with White Supremacy and Heteropatriarchy,” Yola
Gómez and Paddy Farr work from the premise that fear, an emotion that has
a biological purpose, is used as a device for social control when, for
instance, reactionary populists incite crowds to act against others. The
authors base their thoughts on affect theory and autotheory, applied to a
variety of creative works, to explore the ideological foundations in which
individuals identify and, possibly, combat fear as an embodied experience.
Also dealing with popular culture phenomena, Adelheid Rundholz, in
“From Frightful Monsters to Monstrous Fear: The Evolution of Zombies
from Horror to Social Criticism,” looks at the figure of the undead in cinema
and television series. The author investigates the historical evolution of the
zombie from Haitian voodoo to early horror films to currently popular
television series like The Walking Dead to show how the zombie reflects
the changing role of fear throughout its treatments in popular media.
In “Going Beyond Risk Society from an Affirmative Posthumanist
Perspective in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army and Megan Hunter’s The
End We Start From,” Mahinur Gözde Kasurka undertakes a close reading
of two novels to show how they deconstruct the binary logic of the
Enlightenment tradition. The author focuses on the binary division of
human/nonhuman and reads the two novels under study as examples of how
this binary can be dismantled when a world is presented in which humans
are not its privileged centre. In “Kazuo Ishiguro’s Critique of the Creation
of Fearful Nonhuman Subjects for a ‘safer’ World in Never Let Me Go and
Klara and the Sun,” Yağmur Sönmez Demir investigates two novels by the
Japanese-born English writer Kazuo Ishiguro and the globally important
metaphors he uses in his fiction, and looks at questions about memory,
(national) identity, and a person’s illusory sense of connection with the
world in the context of fictional worlds in which nonhuman subjects are
sacrificed in a quest for a safer world for human beings. Elif Toprak Sakız
in “Fear Fallacies: Everyday Rhetoric of Fear in Ian McEwan’s Post-
Millennial Novels” studies McEwan’s Saturday, Solar, Machines Like Me,
and The Cockroach, and sees commonalities between these works in that
their cityscapes display a risk psychology that subjects the inhabitants of the
city/cities to a permanent feeling of imminent danger. Based on media
influence and manipulation, fear narratives predominate in the characters’
everyday lives, and they can be read as (fictional) representations of the
 Post-Millennial Cultures of Fear in Literature: Fear, Risk and Safety ix

contemporary culture of fear. The following chapter of the volume is also

concerned with works by Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Anastasia
Logotheti, in “‘Mysterious Emotions’: The Fear of Artificial Friends in Ian
McEwan’s Machines Like Me and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun,”
stresses how the novelists create fictional worlds in which the respective
societies are technologically advanced. Significantly, these worlds are
populated by many artificial friends. As humans and machines strive to
coexist in these dystopian scenarios, both novelists portray a culture of fear
in which new modes and new ways of interaction with others—both human
and nonhuman—have to be found.
“Rising Fear, Populism, and Social Media Surveillance: Post-Brexit
Britain in Sam Byers’ Perfidious Albion” centres on Edmundsbury, a
fictional British town that functions as a microcosm for Britain. Deniz
Kırpıklı grounds the analysis of Byers’ dystopian satirical novel in its
characters. Everybody has been traumatized by the experience of Brexit and
is now engaged in retaining the dividing energies that had characterized the
times leading up to Brexit. In this post-Brexit world, old antagonisms and
hatred are redirected by populism, social media algorithms, and
technological surveillance that foster feelings of fear in all involved. Elvan
Karaman Mez’s chapter, “Nuclear Threat and State Oppression in The
Genius by Howard Brenton” features a return to the Margaret Thatcher
years and the decade of the 1980s. As Mez illustrates by closely reading The
Genius, this period in British history presents (some of) the roots of
contemporary cultures of fear; these include the threat of nuclear destruction,
mistrust of capitalism, right-wing politics and populism, and various social
crises, among others. In “Culture of Fear in a Liquid Modern World:
Peripeteia of Western Society in Zinnie Harris’ How to Hold Your Breath,”
Mert Güçlü acknowledges, as do the authors of the first chapter in this
volume, that fear has a biological function that helped humans to survive by
avoiding direct dangers in their environment, but that the perception of fear
has evolved and taken on an entirely new role in post-millennial times. The
author demonstrates how, in How to Hold Your Breath, the play displays a
culture of fear. In the play, fear is no longer connected to any common
standard of morality but instead has become a dominant force that
permeates all aspects of human life and, in turn, (negatively) affects
people’s interactions with each other and the functioning of society. Buket
Doğan’s “Family as a Precarious Community in Rachel Cusk’s In the Fold,”
uses ideas of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and applies them to
Rachel Cusk’s novel. At the centre of In the Fold are characters who have
lost the ability to feel like they are part of a community, regardless of
whether they live in urban, suburban, or rural environments. In this
x Introduction

dystopian novel, various fears, uncertainties, and anxieties have driven

individuals to live a toxic, solipsistic existence which, in turn, prevents them
from feeling togetherness or community with anyone.
In “Language of Fear and Safety: Brick Lane and The Few,” Mustafa
Güneş is interested in the plight of women. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and
Hakan Günday’s The Few, post-millennial novels by a Bangladeshi and
Turkish writer, respectively, survey experiences of immigrant women in
England and how a woman’s right to express herself is hampered by patriarchal
dominance and religious, cultural, familial, and linguistic realities. The
immigrant women in the novels are particularly disadvantaged and must
struggle against their fears to achieve a sense of self and a degree of
independence. The final chapter, Hira Naz’s “Reframing Identities and
Cultural Politics in Post-9/11 Contemporary Pakistani Literature: H. M.
Naqvi’s Home Boy and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist,”
compares two novels which both refer to the after-effects of the 9/11 terror
attacks on the United States. This event, the author suggests, has not just
produced many fears but has also altered individuals’ sense of identity and
belonging. The novelists, both diasporic Pakistanis, create characters whose
sense of their immigrant and thus hyphenated identity is made more
complex after 9/11 due to a new era of fear that leads to the immigrants'
marginalization by others (Americans) and reinforces the legacy of
Eurocentrism and colonialist attitudes.
The words fear, risk, and safety have come to define our contemporary
age and have been construed as a dynamic background in the human
sciences against which most risk narratives, imaginative or otherwise, can
be read. In the conclusion to the volume, Hywel Dix argues that we are
living in a period where fear as a commodity has become incorporated into
the dominant ideology of capitalist societies in very deep and complicated
ways. Acknowledging this, the volume brings together original articles to
investigate “cultures of fear” in post-millennial works and covers a wide
variety of topics and genres ranging from post-millennial political fictions,
post-humanist and postcolonial rewritings to trauma narratives, risk narratives,
literary disaster discourses, and apocalyptic scenarios. The editors are
hopeful that the approaches and insights presented in this volume are of
interest to scholars and researchers working in the fields of literary and
cultural studies, as well as the general reader with a curiosity about the many
ways in which we can attempt to decipher the complex world we live in.
The editors wish to thank all contributors for their work and collaboration
on this book. We would like to express our special thanks to Hywel Dix for
his invaluable contribution. Thanks also go to Cambridge Scholars
Publishing for their support of this project and of the editors.
 CHAPTER ONE

THROUGH THE TRANSMUTATION OF MY OWN

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES:
AFFECTIVE AUTOTHEORETICAL ACCOUNTS
OF FEAR AS CRITICAL ENGAGEMENTS WITH
WHITE SUPREMACY AND HETEROPATRIARCHY

YOLA GÓMEZ AND PADDY FARR

Introduction
Fear is the most basic affect experienced when under threat (Damasio 1999).
This was the first of the affects to evolve in life on Earth. Everything from
reptiles to birds to mammals experience fear. In this sense, fear has a
biological purpose, to signal to the perceiver a danger in the environment
(Damasio 1999; Tomkins 2008a; 2008b; Kelly 2009). Today, the experience
of fear has accelerated. However, at the same time, fear is not an experience
that is always connected to a real danger in the world but instead is used as
a device for social control. Here, the rhetoric of reactionary populism uses
fear as a means to trigger the crowd to act against the other (Massumi 2002;
Ahmed 2004; Puar 2007). Hence, fear is both a means to control and an
affect which evolved for protection. This formation of fear, in these two
directions, provides insight into the affect as a means to survival but also as
ideological. In order to grasp how fear is distributed, this chapter employs
affect theory and autotheory to uncover the ideological bases in which the
subject identifies fear as an embodied experience.
First, affect theory is a method of social analysis and ideology critique
that identifies the social-relational formation of affects and emotions.
Authors including Brian Masumi (2002), Sara Ahmed (2004), and Jasbir
Puar (2007) have elaborated ways in which affect and emotion are used by
social forces to establish ideological positions against the other. However,
at the same time, they have elaborated how western philosophy has privileged
2 Chapter One

abstract thought as the highest form of knowledge, whereas colonized

people have privileged embodied experience of emotion as the means to
grasp the world. Hence, although affect and emotion are used as a device
for ideology and social control, these are likewise an alternative way of
knowing and grasping the world.
Second, autotheory is the utilization and synthesis of theory from the
body as politics. Illuminating the discourses that have presided over the
body, authors such as David Marriott (2020), Arianna Zwartjes (2019), and
Aisha Sabatini-Sloan (2017) have elaborated the use of personal embodied
experience to understand the social forces of oppression. Autotheory is
connected to feminist praxis of the personal-political and to what Cherrie
Moraga (1980) calls “theory in the flesh,” a form of rebellion through
storytelling. Privileging the voices of those living on the margins, it
generates theory from embodied lived experience. Connected to the critical
race theory tenet that narratives provide knowledge into the experience of
racism, autotheoretical accounts form from personal narratives. Employing
an affective autotheory, we will analyze how fear moves in two
contradictory directions, on the one hand towards ideology and reaction,
and on the other towards critical consciousness.
The coalescence of pandemic, war, environmental destruction, social
strife, etc. has become a signifier of end times in the collective imagination.
It has become cliché to say we are living through apocalypse. The
widespread fear triggered by these events has invaded every aspect of life.
And yet for colonized people, the world was already apocalyptic. From the
moment of colonization, the world underwent apocalypse, all was destroyed
and changed forever. The processes continue generation after generation,
destroying anew each world recreated. Between these two positions of the
collective imagination and coloniality, fear takes on two roles. In the first
instance, fear is imaginary and ideological. It evokes in the perceiver a fear
of becoming other, of experiencing the apocalypse of the other. In the latter
instance, it is the effect left by historical trauma and the cyclical processes
of trauma following colonization. It is a fear triggered from a scar. It would
be remiss of us to not include embodiment. To this effect, in this chapter,
we will be employing affect theory and autotheory as analytic tools for
uncovering these contradictory experiences of fear in twenty-first-century
literature, film, and music.
First, we explain affect theory and autotheory, both with special attention
to fear. Second, we look at the literature of the COVID-19 Pandemic
memoire and the zombie film. We argue that these genres both are particular
of ideological effects of fear. As a counter to these ideological affects, we
investigate how Black music employs both autotheory and affect through
 Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences 3

challenges to heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. Through Black music,

the tension between joy and fear develops a critical engagement with
ideology. This reading of Black music is extended to the literatures of
autotheory through which we analyze the work of Imani Barbarin (2021),
David Marriott (2020), and Aisha Sabatini-Sloan (2017). These authors use
personal affective experience to develop a critical theory. This mark of
affect theory develops a practice of theory wherein the personal is political.
Finally, breaking the fourth wall, we use our own experiences and writing
in autotheory to develop a direction for social action. It is this final step that
provides the reader with the means to take the theory behind this chapter
and transform it back into personal experience.

Affect Theory
What is fear? What is the experience of fear? How is it generated
psychically and socially? These questions are central to any discussion on
the acceleration of fear within the context of twenty-first-century apocalypse.
In order to elaborate on these questions, we employ affect theory as a means
to ideology critique. Affect theory employs the relational formation of affect
and emotion as a means to ideology critique and social analysis. In this line
of inquiry, central authors include Brian Masumi (2002), Sara Ahmed
(2004), and Jasbir Puar (2007) each of whom has focused attention on the
ideological use of emotions and affects for social control. Within these
works, attention is drawn to the ways in which western societies have
established power through abstract thought as a medium for social control.
Here, this mode of social control is exercised over enslaved and colonized
peoples who have employed embodied emotional experience as a medium
for sharing knowledge.
Fear is an affect, an emotion, and a feeling. Grasping how it effects a
person experiencing fear within the context of apocalypse requires first
disambiguating fear across these three dimensions. Following Masumi’s
definitions of affect-feeling-emotion: 1) affect is first the “immediately
embodied … purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the
skin-at the surface of the body, at its interface with things” (Massumi 2002,
25) and second “a change in which powers to affect and be affected are
addressable by a next event and how readily addressable they are—or to
what degree they are present as futurities” (Massumi 2002, 15); 2) Feeling
is a cognitive response to the affect wherein the experience of the affect is
checked against past experiences as “a directly disjunctive self-coinciding
… always doubled by the feeling of having a feeling” (Massumi 2002, 13);
3) Emotion is a socially constructed shared understanding of the affect and
4 Chapter One

feeling via “a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of

an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal”
(Massumi 2002, 28). Delineated, affect, feeling and emotion can be defined
thusly: “affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity” and “a moment
of unformed and unstructured potential … feeling is a sensation that has
been checked against previous experiences and labelled … [and] emotion is
the projection/display of a feeling” within a social context (Shouse 2005).
From this delineation, it is possible to define fear according to affect
theory. First, fear is the most basic affect experienced when under threat.
This was the first of the affects to evolve in life on Earth. As described by
Damasio, it is among the most primary affective-emotional experiences
which enable an organism to survive (Damasio 1999). Fear is a response to
external cues in one’s environment that trigger a response for self-
preservation. Everything from reptiles to birds to mammals experience fear
as a means to an adaptive response to threat. Following Massumi’s
disambiguation, this first moment of fear is the purely biological autonomic
reaction. In this sense, fear has a biological purpose, to signal to the
perceiver a danger in the environment. Primarily, this affect evolved as a
means to self-preservation. On a purely biological autonomic level, it can
be tracked within neurological structures within the limbic system (Tomkins
2008a; 2008b; Kelly 2009). For the affect of fear, the limbic location is
centred within the amygdala and hippocampus, both of which produce a
hormone response within the body (Tomkins 2008a; 2008b).
Second, while the effect of fear triggers a response, the sensation
experienced by a person is distinct from the affect. As explained by
Massumi, the sensation of fear is thus a feeling checked against a person’s
past feelings to identify the current affect. The experience of fear can only
be described idiosyncratically as a what-it’s-likeness of the feeling: the
experience of fear is thus a question of phenomenology. This involves an
experience of “what it’s like” to have fear, also known as qualia. The
different experiences a person has create a catalogue of feelings in the body
from which the experiencer can compare. The what-it’s-likeness of fear for
the experiencer thus becomes the idiosyncratic grasp of the event’s meaning
and likewise produces an idiosyncratic response: do I run, do I freeze, do I
fight, do I fawn. Each of these responses is firstly autonomic but secondly
developed through a specific phenomenology of the experiencer.
Finally, where affect is the biological autonomic response to a cue, and
where feeling is the phenomenological experience of that response, emotion
is the way in which the experience is shared between people. For fear, this
means the way in which both triggers and the experience of fear are
communicated and move socially. Massumi explains this as “the sociolinguistic
 Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences 5

fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward

defined as personal” (Massumi 2002, 28). The way in which the experience
is shared, both the perceived trigger for and the interpersonally shared
qualities of the experience, becomes an emotion via the process of social
sharing. At this final moment, the affect and feeling become something
other than purely biological-psychological to encompass a movement from
the individual to the social world.
The process of affect to feeling to emotion is thus: 1. A person experiences
an autonomic response to a cue, 2. The person feels the experience through
checking the sensation against past experiences, 3. The emotion is defined
socially through a signification of the feeling communicated to others.
However, this is not the complete story. When involving a trigger within the
environment, the affect is directed at the external object, however, at the
same time that fear is evolved through these external cues triggering
responses, fear can likewise be triggered through both internal cues
involved with past experience and interpersonal cues shared between
people. For example, the survivor of trauma who has developed Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder will experience an internal dialectic between
their attempts to constrict their memory of the trauma while simultaneously
becoming triggered through intrusions of their memories of the traumas
(Herman 1991). This dialectic of constriction and intrusion develops a
tension in which the synergy between the two poles increases the internal
trigger associated with the intrusion. Similarly, the discourses shared
interpersonally through media and relationships shape the experiencer’s
trigger of what is to be feared (Ahmed 2004).
Hence, internal triggers can be generated through other means, either
psychically or socially constructed. What is feared and one’s response to
fear is fully developed from one’s personal history with threats. However,
this personal experience is generated through the social conditions that
provide what one learns is a threat. In this way, although western
psychology had privileged cognition over affect, the experience of affect is
primary to cognition, thus making cognition an impossibility without first
an affect giving rise to it (Tomkins 2008a; 2008b; Kelly 2009). Here, fear
holds a special place that shapes both psychological and social structures
designed for security and which affects both phenomenological experience
and social organization. In this way, the social mode of emotions becomes
the affective cue triggering fear and the formation of the catalogue designed
to categorize the feeling experience. Following Massumi, Ahmed, and Puar,
affect-feeling-emotion are thus characteristic of ideological practices that
shape social oppression and power structures.
6 Chapter One

Autotheory
Autotheory is the utilization and synthesis of theory from the body as
politics. Privileging the voices of those living on the margins, it generates
theory from embodied lived experience. Autotheory is connected to both
critical race theory's tenet of narrativity, and the feminist praxis of the
personal-political. Defined, autotheory is the use of personal experience in
writing to challenge the academic norms and commitments of white
supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. By employing personal
experience in the form of poetry and narrative, autotheoretical accounts
reclaim and redefine critical concepts. In order to grasp how this process of
autotheory works and in what directions it moves, the location from which
it has moved from is critical to understand. This is traced below in two
directions. First, it is traced to narratives produced by Black, Indigenous,
and People of Color written on experiences under white supremacy and how
this has been employed by critical race theory through the tenet of
narrativity of critique. Second, it is traced to Women of Color feminist
scholarship employing poetry and narrative to explicitly develop a personal-
political feminist theory as critique of both the white-dominated feminism
and the masculine-dominated Civil Rights Movement.
Autotheory as a discrete term is often traced back to Stacey Young’s
(1997) book Changing the Wor(L)D: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist
Movement (Zwartjes 2019; Fournier 2022). However, the mode of theory
which developed into the contemporary concept of autotheory, traces back
to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color narratives through the history of
white supremacy (Delgado and Stepancic 2012). Books as old as Narrative
of the Life of Fredrick Douglass (1845) and Black Elk Speaks (1932)1 and
many other narratives of enslavement and colonization have developed a
mode in which, critique of the systems of white supremacy are developed
through concrete experience. This tradition of narrativity is considered a
central tenet within critical race theory as a means to critique systems of
racism (Delgado and Stepancic 2012). Hence, connected to the critical race
theory tenet that narratives provide knowledge into, the experience of
racism, autotheoretical accounts form from personal narratives.
Nevertheless, while this tenet of narrativity has been central to critical race
theory, its origin within both critical race theory and autotheory is most
directly traced to Women of Color feminism of the 1960s and 70s (Young

1It is critical to recognize that while Black Elk Speaks has marked a moment within
narrativity by Indigenous people, it has likewise been criticized by Native scholars
on the basis that a white author, John Neuhardt, wrote the narrative from a translation
of Black Elk by his son (Holler 2000) thus challenging the legitimacy of the book.
 Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences 7

1997; Zwartjes 2019; Fournier 2022; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1980; Hull,
Bell-Scott, and Smith 1982).
In particular, two works stand out within Women of Color feminist
scholarship as shaping the field of autotheory. The first is Cherie Moraga
and Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1980) anthology This Bridge Called My Back which
brought together many of the most influential Women of Color feminists to
write a hybrid form of poetry and non-fiction developing a critique of both
radical feminism and the Civil Rights Movement through narratives of
personal experience. In the introduction, Cherrie Moraga calls this mode of
conceptualization and critique “theory in the flesh,” a form of rebellion
against and critique of theory through narrativity. This concept of “theory
in the flesh” is reflected within the title, where Moraga and Anzaldúa
identify the body as the bridge from which the critical theory and practice
of race, gender, class, and sexuality be established. The second is Akasha
Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s (1982) anthology All the
Women are White, All the Blacks are Men but Some of Us are Brave which,
like This Bridge, brought together many of the most notable feminist
Women of Color to compose hybrid work challenging theory through
narrative.
In contemporary autotheoretical writing, poetry and auto-biography
have remained a central mode of developing critical postures. Illuminating
the discourses that have presided over the body, authors such as Sara Ahmed
(2017), David Marriott (2020), Aisha Sabatini-Sloan (2017), and others
have elaborated the use of personal embodied experience to understand the
social forces of oppression. Common amongst each of these authors is a use
of personal experience to write narratives that critique theoretical
assumptions and to form theory from lived experience. Whereas each of
these authors does not explicitly mark their writing as autotheory, the forms
of hybrid-poetry-speculative-non-fiction demonstrates the use of autotheory
to expand on the ways in which stories and storytelling have the power to
shape theory and critique. In this way—mirroring the work of Moraga and
Anzaldúa (1980), and Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith (1982)—their writings
identify the space in between, the pregnant pause, and the critical moment
of encounter with white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. It sheds light on
the ways in which Black and Indigenous stories are the critical device for
theorizing and how Black and Indigenous (hi)storytelling itself is US
history. At this site of autotheoretical exposition, affect-feeling-emotion
become the central moment of critique. The personal-political experience
involved in these affective moments cannot be described in a dead corpse
of a theory, whether it is critical or not. Rather, the personal-political
8 Chapter One

expression of the affective moment can only be expressed through the

poetry and narrative of a life lived.

Of Zombie Films and Pandemic Memoires

Zombie movies have become a huge industry in the past decade with
television shows such as The Walking Dead and multiple spinoffs (Fear the
Walking Dead, Walking Dead: World Beyond, Tales of the Walking Dead
etc.), and with movies such as 28 Days Later, World War Z, and the George
Romero franchise (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the
Dead, Survival of the Dead, Land of the Dead etc.). Common among each
of these television shows and movies is an uncontrollable virus that takes
the world over night and leaving the protagonists to attempt survival in this
new apocalyptic world. The huge popularity of this genre demonstrates an
underlying fear in the West of the uncontrollable and violent possibility that
everything that has been built to protect society can ultimately fall to pieces.
This fear, however, is rooted within a heteropatriarchal and white
supremacist understanding of how society functions and who is protected
(Clasen 2010; Moreman and Rushton 2011a; 2011b; Cohen 2012; Crocker
and Zarracina 2016; Wilson 2017). The ideological fear the zombie genre
speaks to is set within the fear of losing the white supremacist and
heteropatriarchal power structures that have stabilized life for the settler
colonialist (Clasen 2010; Moreman and Rushton 2011a; 2011b; Cohen
2012; Crocker and Zarracina 2016; Wilson 2017). This fear is not however
the fear of HIV, colonial violence, war, or prison, all of which are real
apocalyptic fears faced by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
Like the popularity of the zombie genre, banal COVID-19 apocalyptic
memoires, diaries, and journals have likewise blown up in the mainstream.
With the COVID-19 Pandemic, people around the globe began writing
diaries during their quarantines and isolation (Nierenberg 2020; Wurtz,
Willen and Mason 2022). There are hundreds of books titled COVID
Diaries, most of which are authored by White middle class people. A few
examples include Victoria Floor’s (2021) COVID Diaries, Sam Munslow’s
We Will COVive: My COVID Diary, Reflections and Learning, and John
Newquist’s (2021) The COVID Diary: The Year of Living COVIDly.
Although these writings provided an opportunity to document personal
experience with the affective moment of the pandemic, the glut of pandemic
memoires became a reflection of white fear. This is likewise evident in
social research. Both mortality from and anxieties regarding COVID-19
have more greatly affected Black, Indigenous and other people of color,
however, white people have been the loudest in protesting quarantine and
 Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences 9

isolation as burdens on their freedom (Vargas, Mora, and Gleeson 2023).

Simultaneously, angry and loud voices from influential whites have pointed
fingers at Black, Indigenous and People of Color for racism against white
people (Arndt 2020). At their core, the White authors of COVID-19 diaries
describe typical White anxieties of losing power within society.
The ideological formation emerging from both the zombie and pandemic
genres can be extracted through affect theory. As described above, affect is
the purely autonomic response to a stimulus, this feeling is the phenomenological
experiences of the affected, checked against past experiences. Emotions are
the social display and communication of the feeling. Under this final
heading of emotion, the social display and communication have the power
to trigger an affective response resulting in a feeling. Here, emotion can thus
be generated through ideological formations in social display and
communication. Most important for disentangling the affective experience
of the Zombie and pandemic memoire genres is the emotion expressed
socially where an ideological formation triggers an affect.
At the site of zombie and pandemic fear, ideology is manifested through
a social emotion of fear. Rather than fearing personal danger imposed by
the zombie or the disease, the role of emotion within these genres triggers
the affect fear through an ideological danger: the collapse of the social
structures protecting the individual, meaning the collapse of White
Supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. Hence, behind both
genres, fear triggered by a confrontation with an imagined destruction of
social structures is, at its root, a fear of failing White supremacist and
heteropatriarchal power structures. The zombie apocalypse triggers a fear
that social collapse will inevitably lead to destabilized government
structures and social hierarchies. Likewise, the pandemic memoir narrates
this experience of fear, albeit a more banal and boring form, as experienced
by the socially isolated survivor of COVID-19. In combination, between
these genres, where they meet and are consistent with one another, the
ideological emotion of fear is the primary source of motivation for an
audience to identify with the narrative. This experience of fear, as triggered
by the thought of losing social control, traces the line of affect straight back
to white supremacy and heteropatriarchy.
However, where the fear within these genres is triggered by a loss of
government control, which is rooted in and held through White supremacy
and heteropatriarchy, for the enslaved and colonized, fear instead is
triggered by the collective trauma of enslavement and colonization. As a
critical engagement with these genres, Black poetry, prose, and music
generate a means to grasping affect-feeling-emotion as an alternative to the
ideological. The critique of the zombie genre and pandemic memoirs is
10 Chapter One

nascent within these autotheoretical accounts. As a counterpoint to the fear

generated through zombies and the banal pandemic memoir, the apocalypse
for Black Americans began 500 years ago during the European colonization
of Africa and the Americas and the enslavement. The critical engagement
with White heteropatriarchal power structures is marked within the poetry,
narratives and music. Here, Black music provides a particularly strong
example of the directions in which expression through poetry and narrative
becomes autotheoretical. In the following section, the dynamic between fear
and ecstasy, and between suffering and joy provides an elaboration on the
autotheoretical. Even when words are not expressed, as in the case of jazz,
the affective moment provides the means to an autotheoretical account.

Black Music as Affective Autotheory and Critique

In the White imaginary, the other is like a monster which triggers fear of an
apocalypse. The fear is that the terror perpetrated by settler colonialism
against the colonized will turn toward the colonizer; that the colonizer’s
world will be destroyed similar to the world of the colonized. As such, the
only defense against this fear is for White settler colonialism to position
itself as the oppressor, to batter the other so that the world of the colonizer
is maintained. This fear of the other is established and maintained through
institutionalized systems of white supremacy, from the police to the courts,
and from the doctors to the clinics. Describing this system of fear within
White supremacy, Aisha Sabatini-Sloan writes on Basquiat’s tour through
Europe and his encounters with fear of the other:

A white photographer who travelled with Basquiat to Europe was astonished

by the level of nastiness. “He was treated weirdly, strangely, like he was an
oddity. People were entertained by him, fascinated for the moment, but
would sooner or later throw him away. Or he was feared, you know? Just
genuinely feared.” No matter where he went in the world, he was pulled
over. In Paris, with guns drawn, the police asked if a woman who had fallen
asleep in the back seat of his car was dead. (Sabatini-Sloan 2017)

For colonized peoples, the apocalypse began with settler colonialism. The
terror perpetrated by settler colonialism has been passed through the
generations of the colonized. Their world has already been destroyed, and
growing up within the remnants is an act of survival. As such, where defense
against fear for White settler colonialism is to oppress; for the survivors of
settler colonialism, defense against this fear is to develop a sense of joy
despite the terror of colonization.
 Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences 11

The music of Lil Nas X provides an apt example of this dynamic. Lil
Nas X is a rap artist who uses queer imagery as a vehicle for critique of
white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. His work has been monstrously
influential in the US within rap and country music, challenging the
stereotypes and norms of both genres. Teen Vogue raved that “Lil Nas X
has forever changed Hip-Hop as an out queer artist” (Dache’-Vaughn 2019).
In 2019, “he became the first openly gay black musician to take home a win
from the Country Music Assn” (Pineda 2019). However, while his success
has been immense within both rap and country music, he has triggered a
fury from heterosexual White Christians as he has represented all of the
most terrifying aspects of the other. As Jon Dolan, from Rolling Stone, puts,
“he’s become a subversive legend for the ages—a gay pop-rap star who
scandalized conservative America with the lap-dance-in-hell music video
… and a master of keeping the internet glued to his every winking, rule-
breaking swerve, from his verses to his tweets” (Dolan 2021). He is Black,
queer, sexual, and unashamed. In the face of this moral panic, Lil Nas X has
pushed the limits further. In his music video for the song Montero, he drops
slowly to the pits of hell where he ecstatically slides down on a stripper pole
and then gives the devil a lap dance. In his music video for the song Rodeo,
he becomes a monster who horrifies a White suburban Christian population,
even defeating a vampire slayer in the process of terror. Across his work,
Lil Nas X establishes the dynamic between himself and white colonial fear
wherein his own portrayal of affect-feeling-emotion is of ecstasy and joy as
a resistance to White colonial fear.
The joy and fear together are a sustained motif across rap and R&B. The
R&B music artist Brent Faiyaz performed with the group Sonder to press
the boundaries of fear through an expression of joy. In his song Too Fast,
he sings about the joy of survival and the ecstasy of the experience. The
video, opening with a young man lying on the beach with his own heart in
his hand and a wound in his chest, depicts the danger of living while
attempting to experience beauty. Moving back and forth between images of
the young man and his older self, the images of certain painful deaths and
dying are overlapped with images of green fields and farms, symbols of life.
The video ends with a foetus floating over the fields inside a bubble,
reminiscent of 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Here, through affect-
feeling-emotion of fear and joy, life and death mix together as a sustained
melancholy. In the song, Faiyaz writes:

People say I drive too fast, move too fast, live too fast
Ain’t no such thing as too fast for me
Living at the speed of light, it’s hard to follow
I could be dead by tomorrow
12 Chapter One

Tryna face it
So I ain’t got time to wait it out
I’ve been down and out for too long
Ain’t no such thing as too fast for me. (Faiyaz 2016)

Despite the threat of a painful death triggering fear, both Lil Nas X and
Brent Faiyaz depict an ecstatic joy for life. Here, visions of the future take
a central place within the discourse on fear. For White settler colonialism,
the future is White or it is death and apocalypse. This mode of affect-
feeling-emotion is a constant from Jazz through Rap and R&B where
“within the effects of joy and suffering, Black survival within a White
supremacy depends on the successful navigation between dangers while
simultaneously holding on to the underlying joy of life” (Farr 2019, 118).
The tension between this joy and suffering, ecstasy and fear, establishes “a
contradiction between worship of the present freedom and joy and the
realization of the futureless future restraint and suffering which the
American way of life has bestowed” (Hill, Kennedy and Bland 1959).

Affective Autotheory in Black Poetics

While music provides an entrance into autotheory and affect that confronts
the ideological fears of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, the most
critical examples of autotheory are through narrative and poetry. These
forms of expression provide a nuanced perspective on the ways in which the
personal is political. In this respect, the work of Black poets and nonfiction
writers demonstrates how personal experience can become a device for the
formulation of theoretical explorations and critical engagements. In order to
open up this investigation of autotheoretical accounts of affect, we look at
three writers: Imani Barbarin (2021), David Marriott (2020), and Aisha
Sabatini-Sloan (2017). Each of these writers are working with different
accounts and experiences in the world, and yet each comes towards a similar
critical position against the ideological affect of fear. Through personal
experience and affect-feeling-emotion, the authors develop a nuanced
political vision as critique.
In her piece on Basquiat in the Paris review, Aisha Sabatini-Sloan
describes her experience watching the television show Breaking Bad as
giving her a view into the ideology of affect. She writes that “I used to watch
Breaking Bad, seduced by and not despite the show’s graphic violence…
because of what it showed me—a perverse brand of intimacy that must
explain how brainwashing works in cults and armies” (Sabatini-Sloan
2017). However, while she was able to keep an analytic distance from the
show, “there was one scene I refused to see because I could tell it would
 Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences 13

have to do with the neck” (Sabatini-Sloan 2017), a scene that triggered an

experience of traumatic fear due to her own experience. She continues, “I
still remember my girlfriend’s face in the glow of her computer screen as
she watched what happened next” (Sabatini-Sloan 2017). This distance and
yet intimate experience within the socially and psychologically formed
affect-feeling-emotion of the program presents to the reader the ways in
which the experience of witnessing traumatic portrayals can both outline the
ideological and evoke a sense of fear simultaneously.
Imani Barbarin is a Black woman with cerebral palsy who writes on her
experiences between disability and Blackness. Barbarin’s work is highly
personal and yet is focused on developing a political, social critique through
her narratives. In a piece she wrote on her experiences with White
supremacy within disability activism, The Call is Coming from Inside the
House, Barbarin outlines how disability activists do not have privileged
Black, Indigenous and People of Color voices within the movement. She
writes:

“Talking about race in the disability community is divisive.” This was one
of my first interactions on social media. I was talking about my experience
being Black and disabled, and a white disabled person saw this as a threat.
Talking about race in the disability community had no place in the discourse,
according to this person. During my time as a disability advocate, I have
witnessed as disabled people of color, myself included, elevating the need
for more representation of diverse disabled people, only to be met with
“well, any representation is good for all of us” and told we need to wait our
“turn.” I have also given talks around the country on disability and race and
watched as white disabled people left the room as I discussed these issues.
(Barbarin 2021)

Reminiscent of Hull, Bell-Scott and Smith’s But Some of Us are Brave,

Barbarin identifies how her experience of being Black within the disability
movement has left her feeling an outsider. Through her narrative, she
identifies how the movement works to actively undermine Black disabled
voices while simultaneously attempting to profit from those voices.
According to Barbarin, the experience of Black people with disabilities is
not the same as the White disabled experience, and as such, requires
representation within the movement so that the concrete specific needs of
Black people with disabilities are fought for. The narrativity of her work
becomes the critical moment through which affect becomes a means to
developing a critical theory of disability.
In David Marriott’s (2020) poem Goodbye Porky Pie Hat a title he
borrows from a Charles Mingus’ 1959 Jazz song of the same title, he
elucidates further on the idea of porky: pig meaning cop, meaning police.
14 Chapter One

With Jazz, particularly Mingus, there is a struggle within confines. A steady

bass line with freedom coming from on-the-spot freestyle. As with protests,
there is a similar struggle. The struggle for freedom being fought within the
confines of a city block. His poem sounds of the frenzy that is free jazz. He
starts by mentioning “geheim” the German word for “secret,” meaning that
oppression and all of its forms are so pervasive so as to be nearly invisible.
One can feel the presence of this knowing, of this urgency, of knowing a
thing to the bones (historical trauma) within his poem. How else can a
feeling be felt that allows one’s entrance into a space than in poetry from an
autotheoretical perspective? Of course, this is a rhetorical question. One
simply cannot. It’s a form of testament. A righteous way to grieve publicly
that allows one to testify and be heard; in which anguish is transformed into
action and provides a much-needed reassurance or validation of others’
pain. Marriott begins the poem:

because it is
hidden,
secret (geheim),
& all traces
of it
impenetrable,
distant,
like sirens
blissfully
sounding in the dark,
what enters
so assiduously
broken
is also
what ends – the enforced meaning
(Stop! Police! – how it enters the fray) (Marriott 2020)

As described in the above section on Black music, the auto-theoretical

affect demonstrates a tension between joy and suffering. In Marriott’s work,
the same tension between joy and suffering, as witnessed in Black music, is
illuminated. Where the tension is between joy and suffering however, the
account provides an exit from and critique of white supremacist and
heteropatriarchal fear as the ideological. Marriott, rather than solely illustrating
the experience of suffering and the fear of apocalypse triggered through the
violence against Back people, explains the affective experience of witnessing
and living through trauma.
Across these expositions of Barbarin, Marriott, and Sabatini-Sloan,
personal experience of trauma and adversity are used to develop critical
 Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences 15

insights into ideology. Each author uses their account of personal experience
as an effective means to speak to theory. As such, their writings are not mere
narrative but theoretical. As demonstrated through the autotheory of Black
music, the tension between affects of joy and fear generates theoretical
insights while critiquing White supremacy and heteropatriarchy.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

In our final section, we want to break the fourth wall of this critical chapter.
Throughout this piece, we have used a cold neutrality to describe the ways
in which an affective autotheory provides insight into apocalypse and fear.
However, we have likewise argued that affective autotheory necessarily
requires an intimacy of personal experience. In this way, we, the authors of
this chapter, likewise require entrance into the discourse. As practitioners
of affective autotheory, we are a psychoanalytic therapist and a hybrid non-
fiction author. Both of our experiences through these works have developed
for us insights into the applications of both affect and autotheory to concrete
personal experience. The application of autotheory works to eliminate the
idea that oppressed people are incapable of knowing their own histories and
having insight into their own psyches. Here, our own experiences are critical
for engagement with White supremacy and heteropatriarchy. As a method
and strategy for continuing the dismantling of White supremacy and
heteropatriarchy into everyday experience, affective autotheory thus becomes
a personal-political strategy for social action.

Yola Gómez
I, Yola Gómez, am a first-generation queer Xicane trans feminine person. I
am an activist and a writer. My writing is hybrid, experimental, and written
through an autotheoretical lens. I write poetry, poetics, speculative
nonfiction, and flash nonfiction. Through my work, identity is essential
within my writing. This creates a tension in my pieces. Am I a writer or am
I, my identity? How is my proximity to the things I recall and write about
sieved and expressed in a manner that is valid or true? In many ways my
identity markers are ways that I have been oppressed. I have been so named
through slurs, through systemic injustice, through historical trauma. My
naming of my identities and the intersection at which I reside is therefore an
act of resistance. I tell the reader who I am so as to provide a transparency
and to establish a report with the reader.
Here, an example of my work democrats how this works. In my article,
We have always weeping and searching for the dead, I investigate historical
16 Chapter One

and intergenerational trauma through violence, mental illness, and substance

use in my matrilineal line (Gomez 2020). In this effort, I provide a personal
narrative that describes me as a child witnessing my mother’s first
schizophrenic episode and attempting to understand. My mother was
hearing voices, using various substances, and unable to care for me and my
sisters. I explore the nature of my mother’s being trying to understand the
ways in which she was, while simultaneously looking at how this affected
me growing up. My exploration is purposed to better understand myself so
that I do not repeat the intergenerational traumas repeating within my
matrilineal line. At this site of intergenerational trauma, my own account of
affect and identity become an autotheoretical account of the personal-
political. This same dynamic between intergenerational trauma and identity
is continuous throughout my work. In my piece, Half-Breed through sieve
& sheath & you have been shorn, I write about the trauma I experienced
through my former relationship with my child’s father and my attempt to
stop the trauma for my child. I write:

& I was born like the rat in the thicket given

hand outs and praise toward which I begged
Thanatos I emerged in estrus feral infested
with urban disease| I gave I gave until
I was the steam from the cooling bleached sheet on
a makeshift laundry line| My fingers
were Over there I watched as they moved and
cleaned and cleaned and cleaned my
voice would sing imperceptibly| From the crevice
meant to represent me: He was born thus I
was born This is my age| His age| The whiter
than white man that took, took me in, the white
man, the white man that took me,

took me in and I owed it to him—So says

the court:

I owe him (Gomez 2018)

I have experienced this life with my body at the intersection of these

particular identities and so, this is why you can know and understand what
I have gone through. I am a reliable witness. Through the transmutation of
my own personal experiences into a poetics, poetry, and autotheory, I am
able to avoid an exploitative re-telling of my own suffering, pain, or success.
I avoid contributing to the goal of White supremacy that tells us we are not
reliable witnesses to our own oppression. Simultaneously, the transmutation
 Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences 17

of my own personal history in this way allows the reader to engage with my
work in such a way that one is left with an impression or feeling of an
experience. It avoids a re-traumatization for myself and for the reader. In
this way, I testify as to my own experiences and the reader bears witness to
my retelling. We can heal together through our testimonies. Autotheory in
my work can, therefore, provide an ideological landscape within which
collective consciousness raising can take place. Furthermore, privileging
feelings over the stark exclusionary practice of positioning oneself as
superior and purely rational disrupts the status quo. This new theory making
from margins of those experiencing their own lives is marked as dangerous
by those in positions of power. It dismantles and redistributes hierarchies,
making inevitable the return of power to the people.

Paddy Farr
I, Paddy Farr, am a first-generation White, queer, gender non-binary,
psychoanalytic therapist. I am a writer and activist. My writing is focused
on social theory and psychoanalytic practice, challenging the role of
analytical neutrality in clinical therapy. Through my work, the role of the
therapist and the patient is challenged as a normativity requiring an analyst
who knows and a patient who is treated. Unlike the idealized form of
neutrality wherein a therapist acts as a blank screen on which a patient
projects fantasies and replays the past, my work is relational, meaning that
meaning and experience are dually created within the analytic dyad. As
related to affect and autotheory, this reformulation of the analytic space
provides reading both patient and therapist as integrally connected through
their work together: one cannot exist without the other. As such, a
transparency is required within the analytic setting between therapist and
patient that establishes a rapport.
Here, an example of my work provides entrance into the affective
autotheoretical accounts I compose. In my latest work, I don’t wanna die, I
discuss an ongoing analytic group I participate in. The group, a punk rock
band formed at a psychiatric clinic, composes and performs music based on
experiences with psychiatric violence. In this process, our personal histories
together play a key role in the composition and performance. The members
of the band, and myself, have all known each other for the past three
decades, each of us deeply involved in the punk scene within our city.
Through this involvement, we have all come into contact with traumas of
street violence, murder, suicide, and drug abuse through which we have lost
close friends. At the same time, each of our entrances into the clinic is
directly related to these experiences. For myself, my entrance into
18 Chapter One

psychoanalytic practice stems from my experiences with these traumas. For

the other group members, their entrance into treatment stems from their
experiences. From these shared experiences, our music is developed as an
expression of these traumas. In this way, the critical moment within our
compositions and performances is the relationship we have created together
through personal shared histories within the punk scene. Likewise, through
these shared histories, we together protest psychiatric violence through our
music. As such, both the relationality of my own writing and of the music
compositions provide a means to an affective autotheory. In the article, I
describe this process:

From each of these therapeutic factors of the group, the personal-political

comes to the fore. The band builds a base of power, a connection between
participants, a means to form a counter-public, a critical analysis of patient
conditions, and a means to educate one another using their own experience.
In this way, where LCBH Punk composes and performs from personal
experiences with psychiatric violence, the seemingly unpolitical nature of
the music takes on a form that challenges the systems under which patients
are disempowered. The participants become empowered and connected to
one another through an authentic experience of punk culture within a
counter-public discourse to psychiatry. From the lyrical content and critical
energy within the group, the direct experience of group members develops
a basis of knowing and understanding through a critique of psychiatric
violence. This critical knowledge runs counter to psychiatric knowledge
developing an autotheoretical model of instruction and collaboration. As
such, the specific model of punk rock therapy follows a liberation approach
to community mental health that places value on the patient over the clinic
while destabilizing the forces that have oppressed the patient. In a word,
following the battle-cry of Profane Existence Records, LCBH Punk is
“making punk a threat again.” (Farr 2023, 55)

The use of autotheory as a device for psychotherapy entails a critique of

psychotherapy in which the position of the therapist is disengaged from the
hegemony of mental health. Where the therapist and the patient form a
relationship in which an autotheory can be generated, a part of the autotheory
is likewise necessarily directed against the psychiatric establishment and its
hegemonies over the patient. Together, in a relationality that forms an
intersubjectivity, the therapist and the patient become subjects only in
relation to one another through a mutual confrontation with fear and anxiety.
 Through the Transmutation of My Own Personal Experiences 19

Conclusion
From the above, the implementation of affect theory and autotheory as an
analysis of fear demonstrates the ways in which fear can be both critical and
ideological. Where fear is ideological, it is the most important of the socially
formed emotions through which social control is mobilized and concealed.
However, where fear is critical, it entails an autotheoretical account of the
tensions between joy and fear through which a resistance is possible. In this
way, applications of autotheory, whether they are through music, poetry, or
narrative, provide a means to critical engagements with the affects.
At this site of theory production, an affective autotheory is developed
spontaneously through the elaboration of personal experience with
oppression. It is a way to formulate the personal as political through
affective experience. As a direction for elaborating a critical theory and
protest against white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy,
Ahmed explains that “theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin”
(Ahmed 2017, 10). Rather than using a theory to read and interpret
literature, these modes of analysis provide the means to develop theory
directly within a literature, that is, a theory that emerges from the literature
and is not projected onto it. Through the applications of an affective
autotheory to fear, we have outlined ways in which literature and music
provide the means to theoretical insight. While this chapter has focused on
the applications of affect and autotheory to Twenty-First Century literatures
of fear, this work should be expanded. Following the critical engagement of
this chapter, an affective autotheoretical account of fear can be developed
further for literary theory, social theory, and psychological theory.
The affective autotheory elaborated here is particularly influenced by
literary theory. We contend that a literary analysis of fear requires a
combination of the two into an affective autotheory. Here, where we have
looked at the work of two Black musicians and three authors, this has only
scratched the surface of affective autotheoretical accounts of fear. Further
studies toward affective autotheoretical accounts of fear in literature and
music should trace Black, Indigenous and People of Color literatures to
critical engagements with White supremacy, settler colonialism, and
heteropatriarchy. At the same time, the origin of autotheory is in literature
and is slowly becoming embraced outside of this discipline, but this
direction is still new. In this way, an affective autotheory of fear through
literary analysis holds the potential to deepen analysis in other disciplines.
We find both social and psychological theory particularly important for this
project.
20 Chapter One

Affect theory was developed from psychological theory as a model for

social theory in the 1990s and 2000s, however, autotheory is a new
methodology developed within literary theory and is still in its infancy for
both social and psychological theory. These directions for research and
practice offer many avenues for developing an affective autotheoretical
account. In terms of social theory, the analysis of fear through an affective
autotheory should focus on the formation of ideology and models for
resistance within late capitalism. In terms of psychological theory, an
affective autotheory of fear should be applied to both analyzing ideological
formations within the psyche and for establishing modes of resistance
through clinical practice. This includes both a critical application of an
affective autotheory as an analysis and a formation of resistance movements
via the generation of affective autotheory. Because autotheory is formed
from personal experience, these two directions cannot be separated. As
such, applications of an affective autotheoretical account of fear offers a
special opportunity for social and psychological theory.
The three directions for future work on literary theory, social theory, and
psychological theory make it appear as if these three areas are distinct from
one another. However, an affective autotheoretical analysis of fear requires
all three directions in order to both critically engage with ideological
formations and develop forms of resistance to ideological fear. In essence,
affective autotheory is a means to realize the feminist dictum that the
personal is political. It is a strategy to abolish the artificial distinctions
between theory and practice. And it is a method for aligning literature, social
theory, and psychology. Where affect theory grew out of social theory and
psychology, and autotheory grew out of literary theory, these three
directions of research and practice are braided together through an analysis
of fear.

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria and Moraga, Cherrie. 1980. This Bridge Called My Back.
Watertown, Massachusetts: Persephone Press.
Arndt, Susan. 2020. White Privilege in the Time of COVID-19. De Gruyter.
Accessed 4.4.2023 https://blog.degruyter.com/white-privilege-in-the-
time-of-covid-19.