Saints and Sinners Writer Spotlight!

Delighted to be the spotlit writer for SASFest 2026 this week!

SAS Speaker Spotlight:

Jonathan Alexander

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Irvine. A writer of 20+ books, he blends memoir and criticism in work often described as autotheory. His titles include Writing & Desire, Stroke Book (Fordham), and a trilogy—Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology; Bullied: The Story of an Abuse; and Dear Queer Self. Honors include a Lambda Literary finalist nod, a gold IPPY, an INDIES finalist citation, and the Lavender Rhetorics Award.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan to learn more about his thoughts on writing and art, and his soon-to-be published book, Damage. 

What about “critical memoir” calls to you as a writer and scholar?

I’ve spent most of my career as an academic, writing in very scholarly modes. However, in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, which had a very significant impact on my family, I realized that I wanted to write about my experiences growing up in Louisiana, and I couldn’t quite do that in a purely scholarly fashion. I tried, writing a review for the Los Angeles Review of Books about the HBO show TREME, for instance, but I also felt the pull to write more immediately, even more viscerally about what it was like to grow up queer in New Orleans during the 80s. It was as though Katrina and its impact on my family dredged up a lot of thinking and feeling and remembering that I needed to start to acknowledge and find a way to write through.

What themes do you see overlapping across your personal and academic interests?  

I think the theme that unites all of my writing, whether academic or creative nonfiction, clusters around the need to connect deeply personal experiences with larger social and even political situations and histories. I grew up during the very homophobic 80s at the height of the AIDS epidemic and it was abundantly clear to me that queer people were definitely not a desirable segment of the American population. With politicians threatening to put us in camps or tattoo us as a form of warning to others, not to mention the frequently proclaimed assertion that AIDS was a divinely just punishment for being queer, my sense of self as a queer person was formed through social and political awareness of how undesirable I was as a human being. Ever since then, my personal struggle has been to value who it is that I am as a human being, and especially as a queer human being. That struggle can never be purely personal; it is intimately connected to my early experiences of intense homophobia, both locally in New Orleans, but also as mediated through national coverage of the AIDS epidemic.

Can you speak more about The Creep Trilogy and how that project came about, and grew?

In so many ways, that trilogy arose directly out of my attempt to grapple with that intimate intertwining of personal and political experience. I wrote the CREEP trilogy as a way to understand how my early experiences with homophobia had shaped my sense of self so deeply, tempting me to think that I myself was a creep, as opposed to being able to recognize the true creepiness of a society that would try to convince a young person that he was going to hell for being queer. I recount painful experiences with homophobic bullying as well as my reactions to the various historical dramas playing out in the 80s and 90s about queer rights. By the time I get to the final volume, DEAR QUEER SELF, I am writing a letter to my younger self in recognition of how significant it is that he survived everything that he did. So the trilogy becomes a way from me, not just to document homophobic experiences, but to also honor survivorship.

We’re very excited for your book DAMAGE coming out this May! What about queer art and pain have you discovered while working on this project?

In so many ways, the new book, DAMAGE, which I think of as an autotheoretical text, combining both memoir and critical analysis, picks up on the work of the trilogy. It asks some of the same questions. How do gay or queer people who have grown up with significant homophobic violence, sometimes compounded by racism and misogyny and ableism, deal with the psychic and physical damages done to them? Instead of focusing just on myself, I look at five artists whose work seems to me emblematic of different responses to this question.  Herve Guibert and Mark Morrisroe created stunning visual work in response to grappling with living with HIV as a death sentence. Carlos Martiel’s endurance performances challenge us to think about the brutal physical and psychic legacies of slavery from a queer perspective. Laura Aguilar brilliant photographs turn our attention to Chicana subjectivity and fatness as they intersect

queer experience. And Catherine Opie explored in her own flesh the struggle, including the pains and the delights, in creating queer family. For each of these artists, the queer struggle is certainly at times about finding moments of beauty, even joy, but those moments cannot be separated from the ongoing struggle with dealing with the damages of living in a homophobic culture. In fact, part of what I explore in DAMAGE is how grappling with those damages is key to understanding not only these artists’s aesthetic practices, but the kind and quality of beauty that they are able to create.

Can you talk more about your experiences conversing with fellow queer artists, and if/how those conversations have inspired you to turn inward as well?

In a weird way, my work in analyzing these artists has perhaps inspired me to turn more outward than inward! I have begun my own artistic practice of self representation as a way to explore beauty arising out of damage. I include some of my own photographs in the book as well.

How do you hope readers will come away from Damage, connecting either with the stories you recount or the theories you postulate?

I hope that readers will experience some of my deep admiration for the artists that I write about, and that they will seek out even more artists who explore the complexity of being queer. If anything, DAMAGE might be thought of as a field guide for others to take and continue their own journeys in thinking about crafting survival, and hopefully even joyful queer lives, even as we continue to contend with the challenges of living in a homophobic culture.

As a returning Saints & Sinners participant, what about SASFest are you most looking forward to this year?

Besides returning to my hometown for the week and enjoying some wonderful food, I am most looking forward to listening to some great writing and to reconnecting with friends and making new ones as well!

Advance Praise for DAMAGE: NOTES ON A QUEER AESTHETIC

Excited to share the back-cover blurbs for DAMAGE. Thank you so much to these lovely folks for their thoughtful and incisive comments!

“This work is original and stimulating. The particular method of critique and address is unique—drawing from autotheory and memoir, this author explicates several artists’ work by implicating themself in both interpretation and personal consequence..”—Jacqueline Rhodes, Joan Negley Kelleher Centennial Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin



“A 'meditation on how to survive with pain' in relation to queer experience and visual artworks, Jonathan Alexander’s Damaged is a beautiful book. It draws on queer feminist modes of deep interpretation, daring to expose the most intimate aspects of the personal and his own embodied proclivities and attachments/repulsions to do justice to the “damaged” bodies of queer culture—his own and those of artists from Laura Aguilar to Cathie Opie and Carlos Martiel. Most profoundly, the book deploys and explores queer images to make sense of how any or all of us survive and thrive with the pain of being human, demonstrating the power of pictures to transform.”—Amelia Jones, Robert A. Day Professor at the Roski School of Art & Design, University of Southern California



“Thinking about his own intrepid selfies alongside an archive of self-representations by important artist-activists, Alexander composes an impassioned meditation on the aesthetics of queer damage, one that ultimately, astonishingly longs toward the hope and beauty of a broken world. His disclosure of the vulnerable body—his own, our own—is an artistic offering of stunning generosity, a gift no less profound than the very possibility of joy.”—Alice Dailey, Villanova University.

DEI, Queerness, the Anthropocene!

SO grateful to @rebekah.sheldon for inviting me to present as part of her amazing PLANETARY FUTURES series @iubloomington. I presented a 45-minute performance piece entitled "Decadence, Enervation, Insomnia: A Queer DEI for the Anthropocene" -- in a BAR, the delightful BISHOP. I only ever now want to do performance pieces in bars. The audience was so generous, and my hosts spectacular exemplars of graciousness, patience, good humor, and probing intelligence. HIGHLIGHT of the year so far!

Upcoming in Warsaw!

Delighted to be giving an American Studies Colloquium lecture at the University of Warsaw next week!

"The Minima Moralia of Autotheory: New Reflections on Damaged Life'

Thursday, April 24, 2025
at 4:45 p.m.
For more info: https://www.asc.uw.edu.pl/event/april-24-the-minima-moralia-of-autotheory-new-reflections-on-damaged-life/

Since the publication in 2015 of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, the genre that has come to be known as autotheory has risen as one of the privileged genres — if not the privileged genre — of the American literary establishment. A hybrid genre, autotheory sifts insights from critical theory through the lived experiences of individuals, often from traditionally and systemically marginalized groups in US society. Some recent critics have criticized autotheory as a predominantly marketplace phenomenon driven by often highly over-educated and culturally elite writers seeking new audiences (beyond the academy) for their work. In this view, autotheory seems little more than a sophisticated form of navel-gazing produced by writers seeking to capitalize on the narrative spectacularization of their marginality.

Working with and against this critique, Alexander argues in this talk that autotheory is better understood as the most recent manifestation of a form of critique traceable to Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Formally comparable in its aphoristic style, autotheory shares with Adorno’s work a worrying over the “splinters” of contemporary existence as capable of providing larger insights into both late capitalist and fascist cultural and structural formations. Alexander draws on some recent autotheoretical texts as well as his own experience as a writer of autotheory to illuminate how autotheory, at its best, is never simply an indulgence in navel gazing but rather an acute attention to to the movement of capitalistic and fascistic forms of anti-life — an attention equally redolent with the desire to root in embodied experience forms of resistance necessary for imagining and living in our world otherwise.

JA Coming Up! Event and Appearance Lineup / Details coming soon!

Saints & Sinners Festival. March 28 – 30. New Orleans, LA. Event lineup TBA.

Forum for the Academy and the Public. March 7. University of California, Irvine. “A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.” Jonathan Alexander in conversation with KSR.

CCCC. April 10. Baltimore, MD. “Collaboration (Intentional and Serendipitous) as Wayfinding and Remix” (with Karen Lunsford and Carl Whithaus)

American Studies Colloquium Series. April 24. University of Warsaw. Warsaw, Poland. “A Minima Moralia of Autotheory: New Reflections from Damaged Life.”

Planetary Futures Series. April 30. Indiana University. “A Queer DEI for the Anthropocene: Decadence, Enervation, Insomnia.”

The Visual Turn -- Why I Started Writing about -- and Making -- Art

My art practice — ranging from inks, watercolors, and acrylics to photography and collage — really only emerged during the pandemic, when I needed (and had the privileged opportunity) to occupy my time when not in a series of Zoom meetings.  I had always loved art, and I regularly read artists' biographies for pleasure, so I found myself buying a sketch pad and trying my own hand at art making.  I was hooked.  

I also found myself wanting to write more and more about art, and I was really drawn to artists such as David Wojnarowicz and Herve Guibert who were both artists and writers.  I produced some pieces on some of my other favorite artists (Catherine Opie, Nayland Blake, Darrel Ellis) for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I now have a forthcoming book from Fordham UP on queer visual artists and writers, called DAMAGE: MEDITATIONS ON QUEER ART.  While I was working on that book, I was also continuing my art practice and even took a course on queer photography through the International Center for Photography.  The course and the practice of photography aided me in conceptualizing my work on other artists, especially queer photographers such as Opie, Mark Morrisroe, and Laura Aguilar.  

I post some of my own artwork on my Instagram account, and was delighted when a gallery, the XYZ Gallery of photography in Melbourne, announced a show on queer self portrait photography and invited me to participate.  I'm totally an amateur so feel very honored to have work shown alongside some professional artists!

As to the work itself, I have for a long time been fascinated by the self-representation of queer subjects.  Queer people have frequently come of age at times and in environments in which we are told by others who we are, including how sinful, sick, or "damaged" we are as queer people.  And yet, many queer folks have demonstrated creative resourcefulness in taking control of their own self-representation.  I try to explore some of this dynamic in my own critical work, in the monograph WRITING DESIRE, as well as in my own creative nonfiction, such as DEAR QUEER SELF: AN EXPERIMENT IN MEMOIR.  Being able to explore queer creative energy in visually rich work has been a true delight — and one that has inspired me to think more robustly about the connections between written and visual forms of self-expression.