Writing as knowing – a creative critical investigation of research by practice through the production of ‘Queer as Friends: a theoretical memoir charting unconventional friendships as feminist activism’

Writing as Knowing – a creative critical investigation of research by practice through the production of ‘Queer as Friends: a theoretical memoir charting unconventional friendships as feminist activism’ is an intentional assemblage of creative and critical (also known as creative-critical) methodologies. It is an urgent, radical, methodically experimental and important contribution to the discourse of queering knowledge creation through alternative research methods, redefining the paradigm of academia and smudging the boundaries of feminist, queer, scholarly, margin-dwelling, patriarchy-resisting creative practice.

My research centres both creative practice and practice as research. A memoir, Queer as Friends: a theoretical memoir charting unconventional friendships as feminist activism, interweaves confessional, personal and intimate storytelling with experimental form and queer feminist theoretical discourse and is its own cartography of my embodied experiences of friendship. In Queer as Friends, I propose a manifesto for unconventional friendships between queer folk and allies and champion the practice of friendship as queer acts of resistance. I also enact non-convention through the experimental narrative which is a deliberately unchronological (but not random nor unordered) compendium of micro-chapters comprising an assortment of forms including some not typically adopted for narrative nonfiction. Forms include: autobiography; essay; review; poetry; screenwriting; problem page; memo; interview; code; graphic storytelling and cross-stitch.

Encompassing intimate details, anecdotes and experiences from my personal boundaryblurring, hard-to-label friendships with women and gender fluid folk, their disruptive and transformative potential and revolutionary affect will be uncovered and examined. Queer as Friends stands on the shoulders of the recently emerged niche in creative non-fiction by feminist writers, books and projects that successfully fuse memoir with qualitative research and theoretical discourse, what might be called ‘autotheory’ or autoethnography but could equally be labelled queered memoir.

The project’s critical component is integral to, and closely aligned with, the creative submission, the linkages between the two strengthening the whole, the twin strands building a double helix-like structure. Through the appropriation of multiple methods across different research and creative disciplines, I investigate the practice of writing the self as queer feminist methodology in order to address the underpinning question: how can creative writing be treated as research and scholarly practice?

Interrogating the theoretical traditions of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Luce Irigaray, and contemporary queer and posthuman autotheorists such as Sara Ahmed, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Jose Estaban Muñoz and Maggie Nelson, my primary thesis is that autobiographical storytelling and auto theory are critical methodologies for queer feminist scholarship and that writing is a queer way of knowing. The proposition culminates in ‘The Quantum Leap’, a queered-creative ontologicalepistemological knowledge creation framework that empowers creative practitioners to identify and articulate the many ways of knowing within their practice.