My essays span autotheory, art writing, and cultural analysis. After completing a PhD on ventriloquism, feminism, and conceptualism in 2023, the focus of my work has turned to queerness, madness, and family, drawing on lived experiences of the psychiatric and children’s social care systems.
See below for recent and upcoming publications.
SHORT-FORM
Kindling Care
Substack publication, ongoing.
Essays, notes, manifestos, book reviews, poetry, and things-in-between on care experience and intersecting cultural, social, and political issues.
Available online from Substack, here.
Post Traumatic Queer Erotics
Book chapter in Spectrums of Sexuality, 2026, forthcoming.
This essay reclaims some of the troubling connections between queer erotics, trauma, and madness, building on queer approaches to trauma developed by Eli Clare (1999) and Ann Cvetkovich (2003). Queer erotics are positioned as desirable manifestations of posttraumatic madness, which have the potential to transform heteronormative and neurotypical cultural scripts that perpetuate sexual violence. Pathologized symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder are reframed as mad queer strategies, and their erotic-political potentials are explored in autotheory and scenes from the films Mysterious Skin (dir. Gregg Araki, 2004) and The Handmaiden (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2016).
The Dynamics of Confession from Psychiatric Services to Digital Activism
Blog in The Limitations of Lived Experience Series, NSUN, 2025.
Activist approaches that depend on sharing stories of lived experiences in state-controlled institutions can come dangerously close to the coercive confessional dynamics of the psychiatric system.
Available online from NSUN here.
State Puppets & Poetry
Blog post in Community Voice Series, Project Change, 2024.
When the state becomes the corporate parent of a child, it also becomes our biographer. The intimate details and dramas of our early lives are routinely recorded in reports authored by an assemblage of state workers with variable degrees of resemblance to our experiences. Our voices are displaced from our stories, and we become puppets of the state.
Available online from Project Change here.
Connective Listening Practices & Technologies
Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros
Review in Sound Studies, 10: 1, 2024.
Available online from Taylor & Francis here.
LONG FORM
The Art of Being Spoken Through
Ventriloquism as Feminism after Conceptualism
PhD thesis, Loughborough University, 2023.
This thesis examines feminist politics of voice through transhistorical practices of ventriloquism, reanimating the dead metaphor that is typically invoked by feminists to name the problems of speaking for others. Ancient ventriloquial figures of oracles, witches, and hysterics are brought into dialogue with a heterogeneous set of post-1970 case studies that employ conceptualist strategies of recitation and transmediation to speak and witness stories and voices that have otherwise been culturally, legally, or violently silenced, including works by Samuel Beckett, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Caroline Bergvall, and Vanessa Place. Each chapter responds to the question of when and where it is strategic to speak as, for, with, and through other voices, bodies, and spaces.
Available online from Loughborough University here.
Hazel McMichael 