Creative Writing Praxis as Queer Becoming

Abstract

This paper examines how writing practice and engagement with textual artefacts (literature) can trigger an ongoing queer becoming. The paper discusses how the queer subject and subjectivity are constructed in the production and reception of queer texts. In other words, it explores how queer subjects are constituted by the processes and practices of reading and writing. Michel Foucault advocated an ongoing assembly and disassembly of subjectivity that constituted a kind of self-bricolage; a making and re-making of subjectivity that he saw as an aesthetic struggle towards an artistic ideal. Foucault described this process as an ethics of the self. An ethics of the self, or self-bricolage through writing, is a practice that has the potential to inform and alter the way subjects actively constitute themselves. Furthermore, creative and critical texts arising out of a queered aesthetics of existence can act as ‘models’ that strongly influence the ongoing becoming, and ethical refinement, of queer subjectivities.

Keywords:

• ethics of the self
• queer writing
• Foucault
• sexuality