Anecdotal Theory

Can we playFun Gay? Disjuncture and difference, and the precarious mobilities of millennial queer youth narratives

“…Pierre and Pillow 2000), queer historiography (Foucault 1986;Bryson and de Castell 1993;Cvetkovich 2003;Halberstam 2005), and also literary theory and its critical engagements with textual objects and artifacts (Derrida 1987;Gallup 2002;Morris 2006). The resulting methodological architecture frames an analytic tactic of assemblage, wherein we juxtapose anecdotal narratives of millennial queer youth with a theoretical exegesis of neoliberal accounts of mobility, networked sociality, and self.…”

Practice in the Flesh of Theory: Art, Research, and the Fine Arts PhD

“…this is achieved here through the use of the compound neologism theorypractice-on the model of donna Haraway's (1997) groundbreaking naturecultures -in order to hold together practice and theory in a way that reminds us that the latter is, itself, a "making practice," one that is embodied and aesthetic. Gallop's (2002) work on anecdotal theory offers one way into such a theorypractice (Loveless, 2011). Anecdotal theory insists not only on pulling the taint of the explicitly local, fleshy, embodied, and personal into the formal realm of academic knowledge formation, but also on an excavational practice through which we see that very "taint" as always already embedded within the loftiest registers of the academy.…”

“…It is a question that brings us back, though not full circle, to the stakes of the Gallop (2002) quotation with which I began, and to a feminist new materialist sensibility conceived more broadly. It is a question that demands that we craft renewed ways of dealing with the practice/theory relations we inherit; of reconfiguring them not as either/or oppositions but as a set of complex relations that require us to ask ourselves how we understand our ecologies of practice, how we do our politics, our theory, our "artmaking."…”

Re(con)figuring Psychoanalysis

“…My approach to thinking about monolithic, 'masculine' and unwieldy notions like 'globalization', 'capitalism', 'neoliberalism' is deliberately myopic, akin to what I have previously articulated as an 'anecdotal theory' (Baraitser, 2009a) that takes its cue from Jane Gallop's work on the same theme (Gallop, 2002). The use of anecdote as a starting point for theoretical thinking is a way of doing feminist research that refuses to uncouple theory from the singular, the 'personal' or the everyday -that is, from the intricate, mobile, embodied, affective and downright mundane material realities that constitute a life, whilst at the same time putting the materiality of those realities 'on trial' through an engagement with what we call theory.…”

“…Anecdote is a useful literary trope as it sits at some distance from 'autobiography' without being fully 'fiction'. Anecdotes are also usually funny, a bit silly, told for effect, so they aim to lighten up theory, whilst allowing theory to sober up the analysis of usually overlooked aspects of marginal and marginalized experience (Baraitser, 2009;Gallop, 2002). This deliberate overvaluing of the anecdotal is also echoed in Khanna's approach to historicizing psychoanalysis by 'parochializing' it.…”