EPISTEMOLOGIES AND PRACTICES OF THE (‘ABERRANT’) SELF: JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS’ DISCURSIVE STRUGGLES WITH THE “TRUTH ABOUT HIMSELF”

Abstract

The article (re)reads late nineteenth-century autobiography of John Addington Symonds and challenges the oft unproblematic readings of Symonds’s Memoirs as a prototypical gay ‘coming-out’ story. I read Memoirs as a performative process and a ‘practice of the self’.

Keywords

• queer theory
• performativity
• homosexuality
• autobiography
• practices of the self