Of bodyminds and blank pages: the transmutability of life writing and an ethic of reading with crip queer care

Abstract Life writing, and particularly trans, queer, and disability life writing, remains a contested site, accused of being too personal to spur on social change and of feeding a public appetite for forms of confessional, apologetic writing that reinforces social scripts about bodies and selves. Yet queer, trans, and disabled life writers are also transmuting the genre, working with making unbearable conditions bearable. Recognizing life writing as a mode of theological construction and a site of debates around embodiment, selves, and epistemology, the article engages articulations of the material body as a locus of theological knowledge. The article develops an ethic of reading with crip queer care, refusing to read for diagnosis, disclosure, and cure, and instead reading with disorientation, dissociation, exhaustion, and familiarity.