The Assay Interview Project: Wes Jamison
October 1, 2026

Wes Jamison is an assistant professor of English at Defiance College. They were awarded the 2021 Quill Prose Award for their essay collection Carrion, and their essay and Melancholia was selected as a winner of Essay Press’s Chapbook Contest. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and selected as Notables in the Best American series. Jamison currently lives in the Midwest with their partner and cat.
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About My Corpse Inside:  A provocative and meticulously structured exploration of identity, language, and the body, My Corpse Inside (University of Georgia Press: Crux, 2025) exposes the thin and increasingly blurry line between the physical and the digital, between the living and the dead. Wes Jamison contends with the complex and disturbing relationship of sexuality and violence through a torrent of virtual horrors—shock sites, hookup apps, beheading videos, and creepshots—as well as through Jamison’s own experiences of being surveilled and exploited online. Inspired by Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s master horror film Kairo, which portrays ghosts overflowing into our reality through the internet, this fragmented book-length essay clarifies Julia Kristeva’s infamously esoteric theory of abjection and subjectivity and updates it for today’s constant virtuality. My Corpse Inside is a disquieting work that asks readers to confront the violence, fetish, horror, and loneliness inherent in our eternal connectivity.
Julija Šukys: Wes, Congratulations on the new book! My Corpse Inside is a deeply vulnerable work. It not only explores your survival of domestic and sexual violence, digital exploitation and stalking but also thinks about Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and violent-pornographic shock websites. Finally, it probes the limits of the internet’s capacity both to remember and forget. How would you describe this project? Where and when did it begin and what was the question that drove you as you worked?

Wes Jamison: My Corpse Inside is a work of autotheory, a book-length essay—something kind of queer and hybrid and unflinching and vulgar. Necessary. A gift. An awakening.
 
While digging through my old notebooks recently, I found the first sentence I wrote toward this project: “I know how the tongue wags when a head is separated from its body.” As shocking as that may seem as a first and independent note or thought, it’s an image that has found its way into almost everything I’ve written. The first drafted portion of this was a brief essay on beheadings, slugs, and Wikipedia—on presence, absence, and the morality of witnessing violent media.
 
My Corpse Inside is a product of the pandemic: We were isolated, lonely, disconnected. I was teaching and struggling (as we all were, in many ways) with students who were either visually absent from or behaving inappropriately on my screen. How could I police behavior or attire in someone else’s home from my own? Were students “attending” behind black screens and, when they weren’t, who or what was there instead? How embodied do we need to be to learn, and how embodied can we ever actually be online? Why do we even bother to have bodies?
 
I obsessed over this here/not-here tension, this status as ghost on the internet, and how we used it to simultaneously protect and expose our bodies. During lockdown, examples of it were everywhere. I wanted to figure all that out, without yet knowing where that would take me.
 
Queerness and your queer identity are a central part of the thinking in this book. You repeatedly express a worry that you are or were “not queer enough.” Can you talk about this thread of the book?
 
I worked on this project during my PhD, so there were many individuals who were meant to serve as mentors and advisors to me or this project. When I needed to consult with them to develop a reading list, they recommended texts by authors who are “more like” me—a microaggression. They meant queer, and they meant unlike them.
 
As I read through the books they suggested, I struggled to find a life, a voice, a character like my own. So, I struggled to understand what they thought like me meant. How were they trying to define me? That they were trying to define me at all was problematic. That they thought all queerness was uniform and static was prejudiced, ignorant at best.
 
A reading list like this is a formative moment for any project. Of course, my identity is central to a work of nonfiction, but this misunderstanding of my queerness had become a central part of the book now too. One mentor, of a different kind, saw me struggle and was there for me (like that one time I cried publicly about whether or not I should paint my nails for a job interview) and assured me, “If you are queer, you are already queer enough.”
 
I wrote My Corpse Inside, in part, to prove that. I further developed and leaned into this queer kind of poetics that makes my writing irreverent, inappropriately registered, and vulgar. If that offended or precluded these individuals supposedly unlike me, all the better.
 
I would write a passage and would be struck, in that moment, by just how very queer my subject (and subject matter) was. Research quickly demonstrated exactly how queer the relationship between the body and the internet, the body and the self, is. I share this realization with my readers as a refrain: “How queer.” We are never one thing or another; we each exist simultaneously within and without our bodies as subjects. We are in process (le sujet en procès) and cannot be so easily defined–none of us, not even when supposed experts suggest we can be.
 
Julia Kristeva, a major theorist who wrote the book on abjection, so to speak, is a central figure here. You depict your relationship to her in intimate terms, alternately calling her Chris Teva (a play on her surname) and simply K. In a sense, she becomes “your” Kristeva. We might say that you translate her to both your mother and partner. By grappling with K’s ideas and work, you end up coming to a revelation: the imposter syndrome you felt as a grad student (that is, you were sure that others understood Kristeva in ways that you hadn’t) slowly gives way to the realization that you now understand her better than most. (Ok, this last part – the revelation in so many words—is me, not you; maybe that’s my own revelation…)
 
Talk about the process of getting to know Chris Teva and your path as a (queer) thinker, writer, and scholar.
 
Here’s the most important thing I learned about Chris Teva, this trinity of author, person, and theory: Outside of philosophy, she is introduced and then swiftly forgotten, a “fad.” At least that’s how philosophers see it. This resolved a significant tension or crisis in My Corpse Inside.
 
My first proper introduction to Kristeva and her ideas came while kissing a boy and talking about Ridley Scott’s Alien—that is, in a hurried, squished, tangential kind of way. He led me to believe that abjection was about the horror of the (m)Other, impregnated men, and vagina dentata. And that is the version that was somewhere always at the periphery of my studies and my interests. A name representing thought, without further explanation.
 
But then I began asking questions about what our bodies are good for, whether or not we actually see someone die in an atrocity video, about whether “I” exists in my traumatized body here or in the one trapped in the internet, there—and her name appeared, Kristeva, and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with those phallic predators from the Alien franchise. (This was the second most important thing I learned—that what many think they know about Kristeva is actually the product of derivative work, specifically on film.) As when I read Wikipedia summaries of her theories to impress that boy, I tried to learn but couldn’t grasp it.
 
So, I asked professors for help. Despite their vociferous proselytizing that “everyone knows Kristeva,” I could hear how they referred to the theory with intentional obscurity; I watched as they opened their copy of Powers of Horror, untouched and unannotated (and presumably unread) past the first chapter; and I noticed that they couldn’t answer even the simplest of my questions.
 
In my discipline (yours, ours), Kristeva is introduced obliquely, summarized to death (and then reanimated, summarized, death again). We like that she talks about gross stuff, and have you read Story of the Eye? And at some point, we stop caring—maybe because we have moved on to a better or truer metaphor or lens for our experiences.
 
Like my mother, I am impatient. When we ask for help and don’t receive it, we grab the tools and do it our damn selves. My mother wouldn’t hide the hammer or muffle the subsequent banging from that person who wouldn’t help her. Similarly, I bought and read book after book on, about, and by Kristeva’s theories, and I wrote about how I struggled to metabolize those ideas, those sentences. I wrote my own answers to my questions because I knew there’d be someone else who’d have the same questions.
 
You and I have talked about the shared darkness at the center of our work and about worrying about the effects that such dark research materials might have on us, on our souls. You describe watching horrific videos of beheadings, for example. Talk about working in this way, with that kind of darkness, and how you protect yourself. How do you guard against the pernicious effects of such human-digital poison?
 
I don’t imagine that I’m alone in having done a lot of bargaining, as a researcher: If I stop watching the videos and instead refer only to the thumbnails, I am safer; if I read about the video, I’m safer. If it is “news,” reportage, archival, then it must be safe. Besides, these are only artifacts, indices of what has been—we are safe from the thing itself.
 
There were suddenly two versions of me: the version that should be recoiling from the violence and the other that analyzes, that rewinds, studies timestamps, transcribes, and triangulates tragedy between multiple records.
 
It’s stepping away, closing tabs, shutting eyes that makes it all so horrible—and so much more awful—and causes the isolation, shame, and disgust to set in. Because those two versions of ourselves collapse back onto this one body that wasn’t exactly recoiling from death and violence. No matter how we mediate the work we do, we are still pointing directly at a darkness (death, violence, atrocity) that actually happened and will happen again. And that’s not all. When we turn away from the research, we are still faced with the illness, the systems, and the failures that will continue to cause, condone, and perpetuate that darkness.
 
I feel very fortunate that, when I turned away from the work—from the beheading videos, the creepshots, the autopsy photos and all the monstrous comments posted on such media—I was turning toward individuals who, whether they knew it or not, were supporting me and helping me process. I needed to talk about it as much as, if not more than, I needed to write about it. And I can’t thank those individuals enough for keeping me—I don’t know. Sane? Humane?
 
As empathetic humans, we know it’s absolutely necessary to witness, to admit, and to sit with the darkness, if only for a moment. As researchers, we visited these sites and archives of disturbing and abhorrent acts to do that; part of what we’ve learned is what needs to be and how much can be stomached. As writers, then, we can reproduce the darkness in language to both demand readers come face-to-face with it and protect them from the poison.
 
Just last night, while watching a documentary with my partner, I recoiled from an image of atrocity. Maybe I was unprepared for it, and maybe I’m just glad that was my reaction.
 
Your mother (whom I love) figures prominently in this book. You narrate your regular, friendly phone conversations with her. As I read, it seemed to me that she stood in for a non-academic reader, voicing skepticism and asking for clarification. Those exchanges serve as a testing ground for explaining complex ideas in plain language. But your mother also provides a much-needed respite of warmth, intimacy, and love amidst all the violence we encounter.
 
Has your mother read the book? Are you comfortable with her reading it? How do you negotiate the probability of loved ones reading such painful and personal disclosures?
 
I could not have written My Corpse Inside without my mother for exactly the reasons you mention and for her humor. Even while talking about violence, horror movies, snakes (so many snakes!), critical theory, the abuses I experienced as a PhD candidate, we laughed so much. I hope that readers can hear it in the book.
 
Mom is my biggest fan. She’s also my biggest critic (always wishing I would just write a happy dog book instead of all my sad stuff). She reads everything I write and is often the first to read it once published. I always told her, though, that she wouldn’t be allowed to read this one. My Corpse Inside took such an emotional toll on me that I knew she’d be equally affected, if not more so. I also knew that, despite how much we would discuss, I was writing things in this book that she never knew, which would also wound her—knowing I kept things from her. I knew that I wouldn’t actually be able to keep my mother from reading it, once it was published. I was afraid of disappointing her with the things I wrote, for writing about the things I have seen, about what I had endured without her knowing.
 
She has, in fact, read it. And she wasn’t disappointed. I was delighted. I was relieved.
 
Once she had finished the book, as troubled as she was, we had a long conversation about trauma and its in/visibility. One comment of hers especially resonates with me still. It was something like, “We all have some thing we did that one time,” calling up a refrain in the book, “one time, in college, just because I could.” By the end of the conversation, I understood her to mean that “we could all write a version of this book.”
 
I guess that that’s how I negotiate it: What I make visible for others makes others visible. Long ago, my best friend Doc (“D” in the text) and I decided that the best possible reaction to our works would be, “Someone finally said it.” We are folk who are desperate to hear our stories told, and this was one very specific kind of story. Having just found a way to “finally say it,” to my mother and to everyone else, I am also watching a swell of queer horror, digital atrocity kind of work being published. We’re making ourselves visible, speaking ourselves into existence.
 
My mother, now, tells everyone to read My Corpse Inside. She also says that the last ten pages are the hardest, emotionally, so maybe you can just skip them.
 
The final thread that runs all the way through the book is horror films and, specifically, your reading of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo. I found this discussion fascinating, in part, because I cannot watch horror films—never have been able. They overload my nervous system somehow, and the experience is too much for me. Can you talk about your love of horror as a film genre? How does watching horror film differ from viewing atrocity videos and other violent or frightening digital content?
 
I love how dangerous this question is about the difference between watching horror films and viewing atrocity videos. On the one hand, they’re entirely different: Fake is fake. Real is real. Horror movies aren’t real. Monsters aren’t real, so we can’t be hurt by them. On the other hand, viewing them isn’t necessarily very different at all: that video that we watched of Daniel Pearl’s “live beheading” was actually a reenactment. The FBI showed up at Benjamin Vanderford’s door after he released a (fabricated) video of his own beheading. Islamic Global Media took credit for it. For years, films like Faces of Death and Cannibal Holocaust circulated as “snuff films,” despite the “brain” being cauliflower. Authorities weren’t keen on believing “1 Lunatic 1 Icepick” was real until body parts started showing up in people’s mail. But we can put this issue of the realness of perception aside for now.
 
There is no doubt that Kairo (translated to Pulse for its American release) is fictitious. It’s actually kind of melodramatic and tragic. It’s not even particularly scary, as I’ve learned from teaching it. (It’s ontological, which doesn’t appeal to freshmen and sophomores, I guess.) But it remains one of my favorite movies, because it puts on the outside what I feel on the inside.
 
That was really startling the first time I saw it, but it became comforting. Horror eases that cognitive dissonance I feel at how we all go to work, do laundry, and pet animals as if the entire world weren’t actively on fire. Horror validates: “Yeah, see? Things are scary, so it’s normal that you feel this way.” Dread disappears for 90 minutes or so. I watch body horror, and my response is, “I know.”
 
I just think that horror is cathartic. Especially for queer folk. And I think the best horror is something else disguising itself as horror: So many are actually stories about desire and longing and belonging.
 
A writerly question. You don’t use question marks. Why?
 
One editor called my “missing” question marks an “unnecessary imprecision”–now one of my favorite phrases. Not every editor has questioned their absence, but when they do, it can only be resolved one of two ways: either justify their absence or put them in.
 
In varying degrees of oppositional defiance, I’ve always explained that Gertrude Stein found the question mark “positively revolting.” In her 1935 lecture, “Poetry and Grammar,” she argues that while it may be “alright” as a cattle brand, as a punctuation, the question mark is “completely entirely completely uninteresting.” A younger me was suitably impressed by or smitten with the simplicity of her logic: “It is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question but anyone who can read at all knows when a question is a question as it is written in writing.” That is, the syntax of a question makes the mark redundant.
 
Since 2016, I’ve never had to put them in, so perhaps they are unnecessary indeed. I did, however, retain a total of 20 question marks in My Corpse Inside–that redundancy overridden by protected status as quoted material.
 
I love this paragraph at the very end of the book:
 
I told my mother that this imaginary book began with a simple curiosity, Can I find it, but I never told her what I was looking for, always supplanted by other atrocities. Still, I haven’t explained how this curiosity resulted in horror, a reckoning with the way everything on the internet is catalogued and indexed, referenced and duplicated, eternal—the way nothing is real but always once was. (164)
 
Did you find “it”? And if so, what was it? Are you able to name it?
 
While I was writing, I eventually shared with my mother that I was looking to see if that one beheading video I watched that one time way back in college still existed online. I didn’t want to watch it, but I did want to know who it was. I never found it, but I confirmed that I probably could, which meant I could also probably conjure up that man and the violence against him.
 
Suddenly, I didn’t need to find that video; but, realizing that we could conjure up, replay, and re-humiliate victims in this way, I suddenly did need to find a hypothetical (not “imaginary,” but definitely possible and unconfirmed) video of violence against me.
 
I never found it either. The reckoning, then, was with the fact that I could be re-humiliated without my knowledge and, thus, without my consent—that that body there is just this body here. Always being violated and always already traumatized.
 
Finally, how did writing and publishing this book change you? Have you come to understand something about yourself that you didn’t see before?
 
I did a year of violence recovery therapy about ten years ago, and writing My Corpse Inside felt a lot like that. My expectations have been readjusted: I don’t think we can ever be on the “other side” of violence or trauma, so the recovery will be ongoing.
 
That the book was published of course feels like vindication: I never needed to write like (or be like) anyone but myself.
 
I believe, now, in ways I never did before, that my words will find someone who needs to hear them—not just someone who likes or enjoys them, but needs them.
 
This means that I’m no longer trying to write. Now, I have to keep doing it.
 
Wes, thank you!
Julija Šukys (PhD, University of Toronto) is the award-winning author of four books (Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout, Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of One Šimaitė, and Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning, and Artifact: Encouters in the Campus Shooting Archives. An Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, she is also Associate Editor at Assay and the Founding Director of its Interview Project.

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