Toward Redefining Erotics through Autocritography
Billy Clem | Independent Researcher
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.71106/FVPD3463
Publication: Social Justice Special Issue
Excerpt |
Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.
— Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision” (1971)
This book began in my body.
— Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017)
I have come to believe over and over again that that which is most important to me must be spoken or communicated, made verbal or signed and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood or at some time used against me for injurious purposes. This communication heals me beyond most any other effect because it offers a chance for self-examination, dialogue, polylogue, connection, shelter, and healing. I write now at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century on the stolen land of a nation-state—undoubtedly the most powerful corporate organization in the history of human civilization on Earth—made possible through genocide and slavery and misogyny. As a white gay and disabled male from the lowest economic class, with radical feminist, Black feminist, Womanist, and anti-capitalist politics, the meaning of all this rests upon the fact that I am still alive and might not be—according to some people and their ideas and actions or, for that matter, the diseases and disorders ravaging my body.
Keywords | Autocritography, Erotics, Oppression, Gay Men, Sexuality, Feminism, Difference, Mutuality, Violence, Pornography, Justice, Audre Lorde
Billy Clem (billyclem1@yahoo.com) teaches English outside Chicago, IL., USA. His research interests include contemporary Anglophone Literatures, Feminist, Decolonial, and Marxist Theories, Dis/Ability Studies, and Composition Pedagogy. Clem’s critical work has appeared in MELUS, Voces de América: Interviews with American Writers, An Encyclopedia of African American Literature, and Asian American Short Story Writers, and his poetry has appeared in Great River Review, Moon City Review, Vox Populi, and What Rough Beast. He has a short interview with the great novelist and short-story writer Anita Desai forthcoming in Cerebration: The International Journal of Scholarly and Creative Expression and poetry in The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Clem, Billy. “Toward Redefining Erotics through Autocritography.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, Social Justice Special Issue, 31 Dec. 2025, pp. 1.1–1.16, https://doi.org/10.71106/FVPD3463.