Harriet Mossop examines pleasure and pain as potential entryways into queer auto-theory in this reflection on ‘Locating the “I”: autoethnography as queer methodology‘, a workshop led by João Florêncio and Edyta Just at the Queer Medical Humanities PhD School.
Auto-theory, the combination of autobiography with critical theory, is perhaps one of the twentieth century’s most important intellectual traditions. Did it begin, as is often claimed, with the philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s account of his experiments with injecting testosterone (2013)? Or more than a century earlier, with Sigmund Freud’s “auto-analysis” of his own dreams, as Carolyn Laubender has suggested (2020)? Whatever the answer, the history of auto-theory is intimately linked with personal accounts of sexuality and gender, as well as queer and psychoanalytic theory. In their session Locating the “I”: autoethnography as queer methodology at the IMH’s Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities International PhD School, João Florêncio and Edyta Just offered richly painted experiences of pleasure and pain as potential starting points for queer auto-theory.
Crossings on Cruising
Rutger University Press
Florêncio opened the workshop by reading from Crossings (Florêncio and Rosenfeld 2025), his recent collaboration with artist Liz Rosenfeld. Crossings explores the possibilities of co-writing from Florêncio and Rosenfeld’s experiences of cruising, the ‘queer subcultural practice of wandering around public places in search of casual sexual encounters’ (Florêncio and Rosenfeld 2025, 5). The two authors, who became close friends during the period they write about, both identify as “faggots”, reclaiming this pejorative term for a gay man. Their collaborative writing offers richly textured descriptions of cruising and reflections on formative “faggot” experiences such as encountering a cruising space for the first time. The book is written from both authors’ perspectives, their voices intermingled in a combined, queer “I”. This intermingling feels playful, inviting guessing games that trouble both authorial identity and normative gendering of body parts. Surely this is Florêncio, the cis man from Portugal, writing about his dick and the challenges of growing up queer in rural Portugal? And this must be Rosenfeld, writing about their clit and their pussy and their experiences of being thrown out of gay saunas as a non-binary person? But the reader doesn’t really know. The authors play with ambiguity to explore and demonstrate the potential for cruising – and for writing about cruising – to increase ‘the porosity of self to other….transgressing borders to creatively produce new kinds of multitudes’ (Florêncio and Rosenfeld 2025, 4).
Pedro Figueras via Pexels
Horror & Life on Endometriosis as Haunting
Later in the workshop, Just spoke about her recent article Horror & Life: Telling a story in order not to run (2024) in which she experiments with horror as a methodology for processing her experiences of endometriosis. During her illness, she compulsively watched horror movies; now she invites the genre to seep into and structure her account of its bodily effects: ‘The feeling that something is wrong. Suddenly there is too much of me in me – a strange “lump” is showing on the right, lower side of the abdomen and it moves, and then it disappears deep under the skin… The “lump” hurts, and the mad dance of intestines hurts’ (Just 2024, 205). Just writes of being afflicted by medical conditions that defy her doctors’ understanding: ‘you are haunted by something that almost nobody can understand’ (Just 2024, 212). She suggests that writing with supernatural horror can be ‘a way of telling the body’s stories to oneself and of translating the body language… to reach an understanding…(if ever possible), to cope with the body unknown’ (Just 2024, 201). Describing her painful experiences through the genre of horror becomes a way of coping, of attempting to understand the incomprehensible messages being communicated by her body. It becomes a way to survive.
Amphimixis: An Intermingling of Voices, Organs, and Eroticisms
These two auto-theoretical approaches draw on the authors’ embodied experiences to produce theory. But, in keeping with the suggestion that queer autoethnography ‘work[s] against a stable sense of self-subjects or experience’ (Jones and Adams 2016, 197), the “self” that the authors theorise with is not unitary, integrated, coherent. They speak from different bodily organs; dicks, pussies, lumps, and intestines. The intermingling of authorial voices deliberately increases the porosity between one body and the next. Pleasure and pain are intermixed in the production of theory: Florêncio and Rosenfeld report that ‘[they] get unashamedly horny, for knowledge needs eros, learning requires desire’ (Florêncio and Rosenfeld 2025, 22). And Just’s painful experiences lead her to a new methodology for writing auto-theory.
Reflecting on how Florêncio, Rosenfeld and Just use their experiences of pleasure and pain to build theory, I turn to Raluca Soreanu’s ongoing project to bring to light Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi’s theory of sexuality. Ferenczi was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, but his theory has been largely ignored by mainstream psychoanalysis following a feud with Freud and his followers. Using the medical term of amphimixis which originally denoted the combining of gametes in sexual reproduction, Ferenczi suggests that erotic life stems from a combination of pleasure and pain from different bodily sources. Instead of assuming a Freudian, linear progression from anal eroticism to a “mature” genital sexuality, Ferenczi theorises sexuality as an amphimixis of several eroticisms (Ferenczi 1924). The term amphimixis refers to ongoing relationships between different sources of erotic pleasure in a way that does not assume genital eroticism is more “mature” than other forms. Its queer potential, compared to nineteenth century sexological theories that privileged reproductive sexual activity involving a penis and vagina, is clear. Soreanu also suggests that the concept of amphimixis creates an intra-psychic relational landscape in which different parts of the psyche can speak to each other. This idea of a non-unitary “I” resonates with queer theory that troubles conventional notions of self. Going further, Soreanu suggests the possibility of an “other within” as an inherent part of our psychic life.
Evie Shaffer via Pexels
The “Other-Within”
Soreanu also draws attention to Ferenczi’s later work which reconfigures the relationship between the ego and the organ, the mind and the body, allowing for organs to be ‘site[s] of meaning and even interpretation’ (Soreanu 2023, 49). Instead of dismissing the hysteric’s embodied symptoms as pathological, Ferenczi invites us to listen to their unique grammar: what are these organs saying, and how is their speech structured? Ferenczi’s theory of organs also suggests a non-linear concept of time in which new organs appear – often in response to trauma – and overlay previous structures, co-existing with them. This temporality, in which the past and present can communicate with each other through the specific grammar of bodily organs, has a strong political resonance with the theoretical field of queer temporality which critiques the normative structuring of time (Goltz 2022).
I suggest that Florêncio and Rosenfeld’s use of a multiple authorial “I” in their accounts of cruising in Crossings exemplifies the queer potential of Ferenczi’s amphimixis. Genitals are not assigned a privileged erotic status or assumed to belong to a binary gender or sex: their writing playfully mixes real and fantasised accounts of having a dick or a pussy within their shared identification as faggots. Different bodily organs play key roles in this erotic space: dicks, pussies, clits, bellies, holes, mouths, lungs all have their own grammar, erotic life and meaning. These meanings change from moment to moment in a queer temporality in which trauma plays a structuring role; a belly becomes a hole and then a phallus, breath is shared between two sets of lungs in the practice of co-breathing; individual consciousness is stretched to its limit, sometimes disappearing altogether. By writing with and from each other’s experiences, Florêncio and Rosenfeld invite a gender nonspecific “other-within” to speak. By reading Florêncio and Rosenfeld’s work alongside Soreanu’s reconsideration of Ferenczi’s theory of sexuality, we can appreciate that the idea of an amphimixis of eroticisms, as a queer erotic relational landscape, has the potential to travel beyond clearly defined queer cruising spaces into broader erotic life.
Cottonbro studio via Pexels
Similarly, a Ferenczian reading of Just’s writing suggests that the impasse of psychic understanding created by medically inexplicable symptoms can be approached by allowing bodily organs to “speak for themselves” in taking up the specific grammar of the genre of horror. In the imagined horror movie about Just’s illness, the “lump” speaks by moving around her body, her intestines dance a mad dance, and she is left trying to decode what her organs are saying. The lump ‘moves, it pulls, it squeezes, it burns, it makes sounds, and it suffocates you…[it is] jealous, it wants you for itself’ (Just 2024, 207). Her organs affect her relationships with other people by scaring them off; they don’t understand the embodied strangeness of her symptoms. Being forced to listen to her organs also affects Just’s sense of self: she repeatedly worries, ‘will I forget who I used to be?’ (Just, 210). In listening to what her organs are saying, and in surrendering – perhaps unwillingly – to the change to her sense of self that they invoke, Just follows Ferenczi in blurring the mind-body split, allowing the embodied soma to speak and the psyche to listen. Her use of horror, with its invocation of traumatic and terrifying experiences where the protagonist is assailed by unseen forces, also dialogues with Ferenczi’s queer temporality in which new organs appear in response to traumatic experiences. Just’s practice of automatic writing, where she writes whatever comes to mind, invites her organs to speak through pain and discomfort, starting a process that she suggests is both therapeutic and a source of new knowledge.
Participating in Florêncio and Just’s workshop about theorising from their experiences of pleasure and pain was an experience in itself, perhaps an amphimixis of different experiences, or even an amphimixis of eroticisms. This amphimixis produced a fleeting moment of porosity between self and other that has deeply enriched my thinking about auto-theory. It has provided new ways way to think about the pleasures and pains of theorising from my own experience. This moment of poesis – literally, of creation – also produced a poem, which I include here as an epilogue.
An Amphimixis of Eroticisms
Body. Thinks. Body. Speaks.
One. Body. Many. Bodies.
One. Body. Many. Organs.
Organs. Pleasure. Organs. Disappear.
Thinks. Disappears. Which. Organs?
Speak. Disappear. Think. Many.
Many. Pleasure. Thinks. Speaks.
Speech. Organic. Orgasmic. Speech.
Orgasmic. Thinks. Orgasmic. Disappears.
Many. Organs. Many. Orgasms?
Body. One. Body. Many.
Thinks. Thinks. Pleasure. Pleasure.
Thinks. Organ. Speaks. Organ.
Thinks. Thinks. Pleasure. Pleasure.
Thinks. Body. Speaks. Body.
About the author
Harriet Mossop is a PhD student and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, and Research and Development Officer in the Centre for Anthropological Mental Health Research in Action at the School for Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is co-founder of the Queer Encounters research network for psychosocial researchers in gender and sexuality (www.queerencounters.org). Her research sits at the intersections of phenomenology, queer, trans and psychoanalytic theory.
References
Ferenczi, Sándor. 1924. Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality. Translated by H.A. Bunker. London and New York: Karnac, 1989.
Florêncio, Joao, and Liz Rosenfeld. 2025. Crossings. Q+ Public. Rutgers University Press.
Goltz, Dustin. 2022. ‘Queer Temporalities’. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1182.
Jones, Stacy Holman, and Tony E. Adams. 2016. ‘Autoethnography Is a Queer Method’. In Queer Methods and Methodologies, by Catherine J. Nash and Kath Browne, 1st ed., 195–214. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315603223-13.
Just, Edyta. 2024. ‘Horror & Life: Telling a Story in Order Not to Run’. Advances in Applied Sociology 14 (04): 201–14. https://doi.org/10.4236/aasoci.2024.144014.
Laubender, Carolyn. 2020. ‘Speak for Your Self: Psychoanalysis, Autotheory, and The Plural Self’. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 76 (1): 39–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2020.0001.
Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo Junkie : Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York, NY: The Feminist Press.
Soreanu, Raluca. 2023. ‘Toward a Psychoanalysis of Organs: A Note on Ferenczi’s Contribution to the Theory of Sexuality’. Imago Budapest 12 (3): 43–53.
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