ABSTRACT
In this introductory chapter, I place autoethnography firmly within the tradition of feminist narrative writing and the literary turn within ethnography. I see autoethnography as just one way of doing feminism in society and, as many of us are aware, there are many ways of doing feminism. When I first started to look at autoethnography as a feminist method, I became increasingly mindful that disenchantment with the dominant Cartesian paradigm of rationality at the heart of modern social sciences led us as scholars to narrative. We did this because narrative emphasizes plurality of truths that all cultures claim about themselves. Narrative shifts or pushes us from notions that there is a single cultural perspective revealing an irrefutable set of truths; and through narrative, any scholar can achieve an understanding of personal experiences ‘beyond specific historical contexts or shifting relations of power and inequalities’ (Bell, 2000: 139). For me, narrative methods generate useful ways of creating knowledge about individuals, collective agency and the interior language of emotional vulnerability and at times, wounding, which to me is at the heart of good autoethnography. In this context, I want to discuss Hannah Arendt’s impact on narrative, which
I see as relevant to this discussion. Benhabib (1990: 187-8), researching Arendt’s relationship to narrative, discusses narrative or storytelling as ‘a fundamental human activity’, while contending that ‘the narrative structure of action : : : determines the identity of the self’.1 In her work, Hannah Arendt (1998: 184) tells us that ‘stories (or narratives) are living realities’ and it is through ‘action and speech that we insert ourselves in the world’. For her, we are ‘not the authors or producers’ of our own life stories, but rather there are many ‘actors, speakers and sufferers’ who exist in the ‘web of human relationships’ wherever men (sic) live together – but ‘no authors’ (1998: 184). This is because stories (i.e. narratives) ‘pre-exist every individual, set
the context for their activities, and shape the way actors are understood, responded to and remembered’ (Bowring, 2013: 18). I mentioned Arendt’s work because the fact that she understood her political theorising as storytelling is instructive to autoethnographers who, as storytellers, perceive the theorising of our stories as political. Simply, on the one hand, with Arendt we see the redemptive power of narrative (Benhabib, 1990). On the other hand, with autoethnography, we see the transformative power of ‘writing the self’, transforming personal stories into political realities by revealing power inequalities inherent in human relationships and the complex cultures of emotions embedded in these unequal relationships. Narrative ‘writing the self’ has been recognised as an important method for
feminists for a number of years (Stanley, 1992, 1993, 1994), while interest in feminist autobiography has grown (Cosslett et al., 2000; Maynes et al., 2008; Smart, 2007). Autoethnography can be seen as a form of autobiographical writing, but, I would argue, autoethnography is very different from autobiography. I would like to take a slight diversion here. In my experience, colleagues who do not practice autoethnography or are not autoethnographers themselves often tend to place autoethnography within the field of autobiography, memoire, etc. Some scholars go so far as to conclude that there is no difference between autobiography and autoethnography or that the difference between them isminimal. DuringmyLeverhulme Emeritus Fellowship and after a plethora of discussionswith colleagues, I am able to differentiate clearly between autoethnography and autobiography.Autobiographical research is mainly concerned with placing the ‘I’ within a personal context and developing insights from that perspective. It may be political or it may not. On the other hand, autoethnography, although ‘an autobiographical genre of writing and research’,2 is all about placing the ‘I’ firmly within a cultural context and all that that implies. However, there is one clear similarity between feminist autobiography and feminist autoethnograpy – both share Liz Stanley’s (1993: 133)3 view that the ‘self’ is enormously ‘complex’ and ‘feminist conceptualising of the self, within as well as across conventional discipline boundaries, needs to be correspondingly complex’. Although autoethnography is writing the self-reflexive-self (Reed-Danahay,
1997a), autoethnography is all about describing the cultural dynamics that an individual confronts rather than personal dynamics as in traditional autobiography.4
For me, autoethnography exposes the individual in a matrix of always and already political activities as one passes through one’s cultural experiences. Furthermore, in asking the epistemological question ‘how do we know what we know?’, autoethnographers demonstrate that autoethnography is perhaps more versatile than autobiography because it reveals several levels of consciousness that link the personal to the cultural (Ellis and Bochner, 2000: 739). Simply, knowledge comes from political understandings of one’s social positioning as well as experiences of the cultural freedoms and constraints one encounters. Hopefully, this will become clear for the reader in Chapters 1 and 4. Autoethnography along with the ‘I’ in the social sciences (Katz Rothman,
2005, 2007) has made a firm incursion into feminism specifically (Averett, 2009; Boylorn, 2013; Griffin, 2012; Shomali, 2012) and narrative methods generally (Ellis, 1995, 2004, 2009; Ellis and Bochner, 1996). For me, I see autoethnography
lying definitely within the realm of postmodern (critical theory) ethnography (O’Byrne, 2007), and being a study of culture that involves the self, although it is viewed often as unconventional or narcissistic in relation to established academic canons (Anderson, 2006). Additionally, autoethnography may create problems when trying to navigate the politics of university bureaucracies (Forber-Pratt, 2015). Defined as ‘an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays
multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural’ (Ellis and Bochner, 2000: 739), autoethnography is a reformulation of the traditional binary emic (observed) and etic (observer) positions with emphasis on research process (graphy), culture (ethnos) and self (auto) (Reed-Danahay, 1997b). Writing in the first person, autoethnographers look back and forth ‘through an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on cultural aspects of personal experience (Chang, 2008); then inward, exposing a vulnerable self’ moved by refracting and resisting cultural interpretations (Ellis and Bochner, 2000: 739). In this way, autoethnographers are sceptical of positivistic research, they question ‘grand narratives which claim objectivity, authority and researcher neutrality in the study of social and cultural life’ and reject ‘the assumed ubiquity of stable meanings, existing independently of culture, social context and researcher activity and interpretation’ (Short et al., 2013: 3). Evaluated through the lens of science and art, autoethnography bridges the gap
between scientific and literary writing. Important criteria in judging the value of autoethnography include copious detail, temporal structure revolving between past and present, emotional integrity of the author reflecting deeply on one’s actions, a plausible journey of transition from ‘who I was to who I am’, ethical awareness for others and a reader moved by the story (Bochner, 2000: 270). Adele Clarke (2005: 8-9) contends that autoethnography is part of the post-
modernist re-representational interventions which, unlike traditional narrative analysis or ‘grounded theory’s analytic centering on social phenomenon, such as being raced, gendered or classed, offers a different qualitative approach focusing on individuals or collectivities’. The strength of autoethnography is that not only does it ‘successfully represent in another medium – such as oral interview into scholarly writing’ (Clarke, 2005: 34) but, as an authentic method, it also locates research experience in the changing ebb of emotional life, allowing interpretations of personal ‘truths’ and speaking about oneself to transform into narrative representations of political responsibility (Ettorre, 2010) – an important issue for feminists who often function as culturalmediators. Representationally, handling those politicswith great care is crucial (Clarke, 2005: 127). Autoethnographers present particular embodied events and emotions with people in time, their social shaping, evolutions and how these events are emblematic of wider cultural meanings and social trends (Neville-Jan, 2004; Sparkes, 2003). Although autoethnography relates to the social scientific tradition, it has no allegiance to any one discipline (Wolcott, 2004). It is truly inter-disciplinary and employed in sociology, anthropology, media studies, literary work, journalism, performance, communication, geography, public health, management studies and perhaps, surprisingly, musicology (see Bartleet and Ellis, 2009).
