Please note that this presentation will discuss gender based violence and trauma associated with the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In life-writing by and about queer lives, there are few examples of auto/biography that reflect, in their presentation of both content and structure, the anti-normative experience of queerness. Might a ‘queering’ of auto/biography better reflect this experience and hence be a truer representation of queer lives? What would such a queering look like? How might a writer use it as an activist stance against the contemporary tidal wave of anti-gender and anti-queer sentiment? These questions are the central considerations of a creative project that began as a historically informed biography of transgender woman Alison Clark but ended as an investigation into a queering of life-writing. The concept of periperformativity, as articulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, through Anna Poletti’s lenses of collage and ventriloquism, as well as Saidiya Hartman’s ideas on critical fabulation, have been my guides in this queering project. These techniques have also strengthened my activist aims in helping me create a work of queer resistance that, while acknowledging trauma, moves beyond it to celebrate and value lives lived beyond the binary and normativity in a hoped for future of accessibility and abundance.

This will be an online presentation made via Zoom. Attendees are welcome to come along in person to the usual venue to watch the stream together, otherwise they can join the Zoom call from their own device.

bit.ly/BioWorkshop2022
Meeting ID: 849 0058 9945 
Password: 630803

Born in Myanmar of Indian parents, Atul Joshi has been shortlisted for the Saturday Paper’s Donald Horne Prize, the Newcastle Writers’ Festival’s Fresh Ink Prize, and the Portside Review Human Rights Essay Prize. He has published in Peril, Sydney Review of Books, Growing up Queer in Australia, The Big Issue, Westerly, Island, Seizure, Ricepaper and the ACE IV anthology. Atul is currently on the cusp of submitting his creative work dissertation as part of his candidature for the Doctor of Philosophy program at UTS. An excerpt from the work in progress was published in Issue 4 of Debris Magazine in May 2025.