ABSTRACT
In 1996, feminist ethnographer Ruth Behar published The vulnerable observer: Ethnography that breaks your heart. One of the key messages from Behar in this work is a call to vulnerability in our writing practices—to write words about worlds where emotion, experience and embodiment matter. In this chapter, I respond to Behar’s provocation in The vulnerable observer and other works such as Translated woman (2014), to think and wonder about writing feminist autoethnography vulnerably as “heart” line work. How does Behar’s work assist us in holding onto vulnerability as a key way of thinking and writing autoethnography? What does becoming vulnerable mean in autoethnography and what is the feminist take on both? What is the relationship between vulnerability and matters of the heart? How and why might that kind of being-in-relation come to matter? What happens when we re/turn our work as feminist autoethnographers to matters of the heart?
