hello, world? Semiotext(e) (2024): a novel about sexuality, media, and power.
“hello, world? starts with that all too familiar scenario of uprooting one’s life for a partner only to be let down by them. What Seasonal does then might also be familiar to many—they go on the apps, fuck around, find out. What they find are ways of engaging intimately with others that become experiments in the relation between the body and the body-politic under what we commonly call late capitalism and might wish to call late patriarchy. The violence of both call for forms of enactment, of selves in relation, that can provide some kind of figure for them, some way of figuring them out. The delight in this book is not just in how closely observed and felt these things are, but how closely thought as well.”
—McKenzieWark, author of Reverse Cowgirl
Graphic Medicine (edited with Erin La Cour), University of Hawai’i Press (2022): explores the emerging intersection of comics and medical training and treatment, combining the work of comics artists and scholars in disability, literary and cultural studies. Nominated for an Eisner Award in the category of Best Scholarly / Academic Work on Comics.
Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book New York University Press, (2020): argues that the very media used for writing our lives intrinsically shapes how we are seen to matter.
Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (co-written with Kate Doulgas), Palgrave (2016): explores how young people from a variety of cultural contexts use autobiographical discourse to achieve visibility.
Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (edited with Julie Rak), University of Wisconsin Press (2014): brings together scholars from media, cultural and literary studies to examine life online.
Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture Melbourne University Press (2008): explores the making, reading and sharing of zines as a unique and rich site of personal storytelling.
ANNA POLETTI 