Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self

by Jacqueline Rhodes, Jonathan Alexander

Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self is a book-length multimodal exploration of technologies, subjectivities, and affects. Blending phenomenology and auto-ethnography with queer theories, we delve into the multiple layerings of text, image, and technology as sites from which to perform/write/read ourselves in the digital age. Through image, text, video, and sound, Techne offers a multiplicitous and changing experience of reading and viewing to probe the often contradictory interplay between digital and traditional writing technologies and the author/ed self. Our goal, ultimately, is to create an excess of experience and observation, not always linking in predictable ways, and leaving room for getting lost—and thus asking for our readers’ active engagement in order to make sense of the changeable experience of Techne. As such, the experience of the book itself enacts a generative, multimodal techne of self, with both somatic and representational consequence. Selves in text and technology must move in multiple directions at once, embracing multimodality, multi-genre texts, multimedia. While we cannot deny the material need for stability and composure, we also need to make room for the kind of writing—and the kind of subjects—that challenge such composure, that offers rich, capacious, and excessive ways of writing, reading, and experiencing. Our hope is that Techne serves as one way of making that room.

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First published September 1, 2015