Feminist Theory

Abstract As an overview to this year’s works in feminist theory, this chapter focuses on the use of personal narrative in feminist writing published in 2023. Overall, I contend that five overlapping motivations give way to contemporary feminist autotheory: first, a sustained interest in addressing the structures of feelings or affects that subtend and give shape to everyday life; next, an exhaustion with and suspicion of both empiricism and poststructuralism; still more, an interest in using writing and scholarship to promote healing or practice care; in addition, an insistence on complexity and particularity and the refusal of generalization; and, finally, a reparative turn towards mothers, especially Black and Brown mothers. The review begins by briefly contextualizing the works in relation to autotheory. The remainder is divided into three sections: 1. Affect, the Everyday, and the Black and Brown Maternal, which considers Moon Charania’s Archive of Tongues and Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes; 2. Beyond Positivistic Empiricism, which turns to Carol Ulises Decena’s Circuits of the Sacred and Ed Cohen’s On Learning to Heal; 3. Attending to Pain and Loss, which reflects on Ayu Saraswati’s Scarred and Megan Sweeney’s Mendings. It ends with a brief conclusion considering autotheory in the university classroom.