Writing Feminist Autoethnography explores the personal-is-political relationship between autoethnography and feminist theory and practice. Each chapter introduces the lives and works of a range of feminist thinkers and writers and considers the ways in which their thinking and writing might come to be in relation with our own personal-is-political thinking and writing work as feminist autoethnographers. The book begins with an acknowledgement of the author’s positionality as a white-settler-colonial-woman in relation with Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Mara and Kudanji Aboriginal women. This positionality has continued to resonate deeply with the responses and sensibilities the author holds as a feminist autoethnographer to move beyond coloniality. She explores the writing of Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Kathleen Stewart, bell hooks and Ruth Behar, with critical affect to embrace, embody and engage with feminist thinking, wondering and feeling. The book creatively and performatively explores what it means to live a feminist life as an autoethnographer. This book will define and conceptualize feminist autoethnography for all qualitative researchers, especially those interested in critical autoethnography, and scholars in gender studies and communication.

Global Feminist Autoethnographies bears witness to our displacements, disruptions, and distress as tenured faculty, faculty on temporary contracts, graduate students, and people connected to academia during COVID-19. The authors document their experiences arising within academia and beyond it, gathering narratives from across the globe—Australia, Canada, Ghana, Finland, India, Norway, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States along with transnational engagements with Bolivia, Iran, Nepal, and Taiwan. In an era where the older rules about work and family related to our survival, wellbeing, and dignity are rapidly being transformed, this book shows that distress and traumas are emerging and deepening across the divides within and between the global North and South, depending on the intersecting structures that have affected each of us. It documents our distress and trauma and how we have worked to lift each other up amidst severe precarities. A global co-written project, this book shows how we are moving to decolonize our scholarship. It will be of interest to an interdisciplinary array of scholars in the areas of intersectionality, gender, family, race, sexuality, migration, and global and transnational sociology.

Autoethnography is a unique discipline which steps inside and outside the self to experience, embody and express social and cultural meaning. At once a performative, political and poetic genre of research writing, it holds the potential to uncover the ‘heart of the world’, if only for a moment. The author uses theory as story and story as theory to explore her place in the world through painstaking and intimate self and social narratives to lay bare the unique challenges and rewards of autoethnography. Framed around the metaphor of ‘heartlines’, the author explores autoethnographic practice as critical feminist and decolonial work and the power it holds for not only imagining a wise, ethical and loving world, but for making such a kind place possible. Through a performative journey of the heart, we travel with the author as she unearths the power of words, of writing and not-writing, evoking in particular the work of Hélène Cixous and Virginia Woolf. This reflective, passionate and pioneering volume will be of interest and value to all those interested in autoethnography and the ways in which it can be applied as critical, ethical and political work in the social sciences.

Autoethnography is an ideal method to study the ‘feminist I’. Through personal stories, the author reflects on how feminists negotiate agency and the effect this has on one's political sensibilities. Speaking about oneself transforms into stories of political responsibility - a key issue for feminists who function as cultural mediators.

Autotheory--the commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography--as a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism. In the 2010s, the term "autotheory" began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.

A practical guide providing researchers with a variety of data collection, analytic, and writing techniques to conduct collaborative autoethnography projects.

In this definitive reference volume, almost fifty leading thinkers and practitioners of autoethnographic research—from four continents and a dozen disciplines—comprehensively cover its vision, opportunities and challenges. Chapters address the theory, history, and ethics of autoethnographic practice, representational and writing issues, the personal and relational concerns of the autoethnographer, and the link between researcher and social justice. A set of 13 exemplars show the use of these principles in action. Autoethnography is one of the most popularly practiced forms of qualitative research over the past 20 years, and this volume captures all its essential elements for graduate students and practicing researchers.

Essays on hip-hop feminism featuring relevant, real conversations about how race and gender politics intersect with pop culture and current events. For the Crunk Feminist Collective, their academic day jobs were lacking in conversations they actually wanted. To address this void, they started a blog that turned into a widespread movement. The Collective’s writings foster dialogue about activist methods, intersectionality, and sisterhood. And the writers’ personal identities—as black women; as sisters, daughters, and lovers; and as television watchers, sports fans, and music lovers—are never far from the discussion at hand. These essays explore “Sex and Power in the Black Church,” discuss how “Clair Huxtable is Dead,” list “Five Ways Talib Kweli Can Become a Better Ally to Women in Hip Hop,” and dwell on “Dating with a Doctorate (She Got a Big Ego?).” Self-described as “critical homegirls,” the authors tackle life stuck between loving hip hop and ratchet culture while hating patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism. “Refreshing and timely.” —Bitch Magazine “Our favorite sister bloggers.” —Elle “By centering a Black Feminist lens, The Collection provides readers with a more nuanced perspective on everything from gender to race to sexuality to class to movement-building, packaged neatly in easy-to-read pieces that take on weighty and thorny ideas willingly and enthusiastically in pursuit of a more just world.” —Autostraddle “Much like a good mix-tape, the book has an intro, outro, and different layers of based sound in the activist, scholar, feminist, women of color, media representation, sisterhood, trans, queer and questioning landscape.” —Lambda Literary Review

This book takes an intimate, collaborative, interdisciplinary autoethnographic approach that both emphasizes the authors’ entangled relationships with the more-than-human, and understands the land and sea-scapes of Newfoundland as integral to their thinking, theorizing, and writing. The authors draw on feminist, trans, queer, critical race, Indigenous, decolonial, and posthuman theories in order to examine the relationships between origins, memories, place, identities, bodies, pasts, and futures. The chapters address a range of concerns, among them love, memory, weather, bodies, vulnerability, fog, myth, ice, desire, hauntings, and home. Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural geography, folklore, and anthropology, as well as those working in autoethnography, life writing, and island studies.

This comprehensive text is the first to introduce evocative autoethnography as a methodology and a way of life in the human sciences. Using numerous examples from their work and others, world-renowned scholars Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, originators of the method, emphasize how to connect intellectually and emotionally to the lives of readers throughout the challenging process of representing lived experiences. Written as the story of a fictional workshop, based on many similar sessions led by the authors, it incorporates group discussions, common questions, and workshop handouts. The book: describes the history, development, and purposes of evocative storytelling; provides detailed instruction on becoming a story-writer and living a writing life; examines fundamental ethical issues, dilemmas, and responsibilities; illustrates ways ethnography intersects with autoethnography; calls attention to how truth and memory figure into the works and lives of evocative autoethnographers.