Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2017

Abstract

Amy and Christina sat together in their living room. Amy held her phone, scrolling through notes she had typed a few minutes before their meeting. Christina’s laptop lay open in front of her.

“How do we start this?” Amy asks. “Do we need an abstract?”

Christina smirks, “I don’t know if we need it right now. Even if we do, I never start by writing the abstract.”

“Then how do we start?” Amy asks again, anxiously.

“I think we can begin with what we bring to the table for this conversation about queer autoethnography: We are a queer couple in academia who often write duo/autoethnographies. It’s our chance to conceptualize how we view queer duo/autoethnography.”

“Do you think our relationship is what makes our duo/autoethnography queer? Or is it us creating a co-constructed narrative that’s hard to identify where you end and I begin?”

“I can see that. Before we fully dive into how we conceive queer duo/ autoethnography, how do you see queer autoethnography functioning?”

“At the intersection of autoethnography and queer theory, ‘just stories’ are transformed and transformative as insurrectionary acts that offer revolt through juxtaposition.1 Queering autoethnography interrogates the idea that narratives not only become stories upon the body, but also storied upon various theoretical frameworks that suggest possible lenses for decoding the author/s’ experiences. Readers are simultaneously offered insight into the residuals of the positionality of the scholar. It becomes an issue of ‘what is being read?’ in conjunction with ‘what is supposed to be read?’”

Copyright Statement

This document was originally published in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking by Michigan State University Press. Copyright restrictions may apply.

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