ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I want to reflect on the stories presented in the previous chapters of this book and I focusmy attention and analyses primarily on Chapter 4: ‘She wrote it but look what she wrote’. I look at that chapter and others through a feminist lens. As I analyse this chapter alongside others, I use the criteria on the four ways in which I see autoethnography as a feminist method that I developed in the introductory chapter, ‘Autoethnography as a feminist method’. At the end of the chapter, I will make some comments on autoethnography as critical feminist ethnography, look briefly at the politics of autoethnography vis-à-vis an ‘ethnographic attitude’ and suggest a way forward for feminists. In Allen and Piercy’s (2005: 159) important work, they contend that feminist
autoethnography is ‘the explicit reflection on one’s personal experience to break the outside circle of conventional social science and confront, court and coax that aching pain or haunting memory that one does not understand about one’s experience’. They argue further that feminist autoethnography
is ideally suited for investigating hidden or sensitive topics : : : about which little is known : : : (it is) useful, regardless of the epistemological paradigm in which oneworks (because) feminists are adept at blending categories : : : wedo not have to be locked into a rigid adherence to relativism or foundationalism.
