In this project, then, we theorize—and enact—how composing practices arise out of the complex interplay among discursive formations, embodiment, and mediating technologies. All are vectors through which we are simultaneously called to orient ourselves to dominant forms of knowing and through which we can intervene in such orientation. At any point in composing, we play with the possibility of critique, of writing ourselves differently. And indeed, we assert that such play is performative and epistemological.

Why write the self? How to write the self? We approach the “self” in its inexact and constantly, rhizomatically expanding multiplicity. Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self explores the interplay of orientations—how our situated pasts and their mediation might orient us, but how we also reorient them ourselves in the pursuit of livable lives.

Scholars in our field have used autobiography in their own work, interweaving personal narrative with theoretical conversations, often theorizing from lived experience. For example, Victor Villanueva's Bootstraps, Keith Gilyard's Voices of the Self, and Morris Young's Minor Re/Visions take seriously the feminist call to think the personal as the political. We see Techne as part of that lineage, with a twist. We not only theorize from the body but also deeply understand and feel our engagements with multimedia technologies as recursively embodied. That is, we attempt here both to map out and to provoke visceral awareness of the interimbrication of bodies and technologies, orienting and reorienting one another.