Intimate Ephemera is the first major study of autobiographical writing produced and consumed in a youth subculture. Investigating the uses of the zine form for life writing, it examines the recurrent themes in texts circulating in Australian zine culture, including depression, consumerism, popular culture and political identity.Intimate Ephemera also examines zine culture as a unique community of life writing and reading, where handmade texts circulate in an economy of gifting and exchange utilising the postal system. The book analyses the material diversity of zines as handmade objects, examining the use of the photocopier and craft techniques in these limited edition publications, bringing a focus to the role of the text-object in communicating personal experience.

Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture

History

Poletti, Anna

Australia & Oceania

MUP Academic

This book considers the largely under-recognised contribution that young writers have made to life writing genres such as memoir, letter writing and diaries, as well as their innovative use of independent and social media. The authors argue that these contributions have been historically silenced, subsumed within other literary genres, culturally marginalised or co-opted for political ends. Furthermore, the book considers how life narrative is an important means for youth agency and cultural participation. By engaging in private and public modes of self-representation, young people have contested public discourses around the representation of youth, including media, health and welfare, and legal discourses, and found means for re-engaging and re-appropriating self-images and representations. Locating their research within broader theoretical debates from childhood and youth studies: youth creative practice and associated cultural implications; youth citizenship and autonomy; the rights of the child; generations and power relationships, Poletti and Douglas also position their inquiry within life narrative scholarship and wider discussions of self-representation from the margins, representations of conflict and trauma, and theories of ethical scholarship.

Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (Studies in Childhood and Youth)

Douglas, Kate

Teen & Young Adult

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book (Postmillennial Pop, 27)

The importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics In an age where our experiences are processed and filtered through a wide variety of mediums, both digital and physical, how do we tell our own story? How do we "get a life," make sense of who we are and the way we live, and communicate that to others? Stories of the Self takes the literary study of autobiography and opens it up to a broad and fascinating range of material practices beyond the book, investigating the manifold ways people are documenting themselves in contemporary culture. Anna Poletti explores Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, a collection of six hundred cardboard boxes filled with text objects from the artist's everyday life; the mid-aughts crowdsourced digital archive PostSecret; queer zine culture and its practices of remixing and collaging; and the bureaucratic processes surrounding surveillance dossiers. Stories of the Self argues that while there is a strong emphasis on the importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics, mediation is just as important in establishing the credibility and legibility of life writing. Poletti argues that the very media used for writing our lives intrinsically shapes how we are seen to matter.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

NYU Press

A feminist paean to perversity- on remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. Seasonal begins writing sentences and thinking thoughts they never thought possible. They want to give Laszl the pleasure of being nothing. The more they come to like him, to value his sensitivity, his sharp mind, his aesthetics, his ethics, and the more they want his respect, the easier it seems to become to think about destroying him. A new set of capacities which they had only dimly sensed are now coursing in their muscles, their cunt, their blood, their mind. Abandoned by their Dutch partner after giving up their home and their job to follow him to the Netherlands, humanities scholar Seasonal finds themself single in a strange place for the first time in a decade. Dipping into the rabbit hole of digital eroticism, Seasonal soon meets Laszl , a male sub who volleys back their cerebral sexts and is seeking a dominant guide. His dating-app profile-a photo of Foucault and the ingenuous greeting "Hello, World?"-thinly veils his desire to be annihilated. It's a desire that Seasonal senses they can fulfill. But to do this means crossing the frightening gap between their desires and capacities. Seasonal and Laszl embark on an experiment in remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. But as it continues, the two realize they are staging separate confrontations with domination- Seasonal finds they must confront their own relation to the violence and anger that marked their upbringing in working-class, small-town Australia, while Laszl stages his own confrontation with his decision to leave Viktor Orban's Hungary. As they attempt to improvise a theater of domination that opens up possibilities of reciprocity, the energies of their sexuality stalk this collaboration, threatening to give them exactly what they bargained or begged for. A feminist paean to perversity in the tradition of Pauline Reage's Story of Oand Anais Nin's Delta of Venus, Anna Poletti's hello, world?dares to fully inhabit female power, and to fully face the violence, beauty, and uncharted territories of human sexuality.

hello, world? (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Literary

Semiotext[e]

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