ABSTRACT
Autoethnography has been criticized for being non-analytic, self-indulgent, irreverent, sentimental and romantic. A performative theory of everyday life “celebrates performance as imitation, construction, and resistance”. The legitimate performances of everyday life are not “acted” or “put on” in the sense that the performer knows in advance just what he [she] is going to do, and does this solely because of the effect it is likely to have. The drive to performance autoethnography within Western ethnography, the drive to the personal, and the autobiographical, Clough suggests, reflects a growing sensitivity to issues surrounding agency and the new media technologies. Performance writing must be personal, raw, visceral, and evocative. It must move to the heart of the performance experience itself. Aesthetics, art, ethics, performance, history, culture and politics are thus intertwined, for in the artful, interpretive production, cultural heroes, heroines, mythic pasts and senses of moral community are created.
