Introduction

The projects of performance studies and performance autoethnography must always start with a person, a body, a place, and a historical moment. Performance autoethnography inserted itself in the picture when it was understood that all ethnographers reflexively write/perform themselves into their ethnographies. Performance autoethnography enters a racialized and gendered culture with nearly invisible boundaries separating everyday from theatrical, staged performances. Performance is always situated in complex systems of discourse, where traditional, everyday and avant-garde meanings of theatre, film, video, ethnography, cinema, performance, text and audience circulate and inform one another. A resistance model of textual performance and interpretation is foregrounded. A good performance text must be more than cathartic; it must be political, moving people to action and reflection. A performative discourse simultaneously writes and criticizes performances. The writer is both an insider and an outsider, commenting on her own performances, as she performs them.