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In this collaborative autoethnography, we unmask our experiences with sexual assault and harassment in academic contexts through the use of a note format. We describe moments characterized by shame and anger, as well as moments of disciplining when we called out untoward behavior. We call attention to bystanders by describing instances of sexual harassment and assault in an article that will be read primarily by academics. This represents a feminist response to sexual harassment and assault in the academy in the hopes of challenging the normalized behavior.

The author identifies key responsibilities in declaring, justifying, and advocating for autoethnography as an orientation to research, including the need to recognize various perspectives for doing autoethnography and establishing criteria for evaluating autoethnography.

This story tells about an accident that occurred at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The first author presents her autoethnography of her partner’s fall and her subsequent reaction. Then to complicate and deepen her telling, she crafts a second multivoiced account from the responses of eight people who were part of the event. The participants’ stories are juxtaposed to tell a multivoiced tale and to theorize what happened in an experience-near mode. Twice-told multivoiced autoethnography brings other voices, subjectivities, and interpretations into our autoethnographic accounts, providing a collective consciousness and offering the possibility of initiating conversations about the values of care and empathy connected with the project of autoethnography.

This essay is written in and as a queer fugue—a series of themes and variations on grief, on loss and remembering, on the constitutive and dispossessing dance of relationality, and on the possibilities of becoming and forgiving. It is an essay about public mourning, queer relationships, being undone by death and language, and about making a case for recognizing unrecognized and unspeakable grief. It is an essay that recognizes the debts we owe to those we’ve lost, celebrates the queer selves and lives we could not do without, and how the words and voices and lives of others who are not acknowledged as fully or equally human are significant and profound.

In “Seeking Father” ( Adams, 2006 ), I used a relational perspective to understand the relationship I have with my father—a perspective that conceived of our relationship as a co-constitutive endeavor in which we each affected the other, and a perspective that showed how our conflict emerged as a product of joint interaction, of us being, working, and relating—together. In this project, I continue a similar trajectory. I use a relational perspective to describe moments when my father and I miss each other—moments when I long for him and when I perceive him to long for me, moments when we fail to connect, moments when we hurt and are hurt by each other but neither one of us ever deciding to quit, moments in which we practice stifling communicative patterns and moments in which we both seek love. May be we’re both in love, somehow.

This essay focuses on intersections of reflexivity as both an orientation to research and a writing practice that brings together the method of autoethnography and the paradigm of queer theory. Taking seriously autoethnography’s and queer theory’s commitments to uncertain, fluid, and becoming subjectivities, multiple forms of knowledge and representations, and research as an agent of change, we write a series of reflexively queer personal texts. These texts ask us—as writers and readers in a community of scholars—to question our desire to name and claim stories and to embrace the gifts and challenges of open texts and the importance of reflexivity as we test the limits of knowledge and certainty.

In this essay, I make two suggestions about personal experience represented in writing. First, I suggest that this experience can be contested when the conditions and the representation of experience are critiqued rather than the experience itself. Second, I suggest that personal experience represented in writing, for example, an autoethnography, can also be “uncontestable” (Scott, 1991, p. 777). An autoethnography is not a disembodied text. A body, a subject, a vulnerable body and subject, is intertwined with and constituted by this text. As such, it becomes difficult to disentangle an autoethnographic representation from its corresponding, constituted-via-this-representation body and subject, thus making a critique of the text a critique of the life.

“truth” is an issue of public discussion, research, and everyday performance. Processes of navigating truth, however, are obscure and often unknown. In this project, the authors highlight truth(s) of written life texts. They conceive of truth as a rather than the “rhetorical device” to use for evaluating personal research and believe that demanding factual, historical truth-of-life research is faulty and problematic. By illustrating how genre, trust, memory, and confession influence truth telling, the authors hope to question and enhance truth-related conversations.

If we use stories as “equipment for living,” as tools to understand, negotiate, and make sense of situations we encounter, then a discussion of narrative ethics is a relevant, if not required, endeavor. In other words, if we learn how to think, feel, and interact with society via narratives, we also learn ethical ways of being with others, “correct” and “appropriate” ways that serve as foundations for many of our interactions. This latter epistemological assumption guides this study. In this article, the author synthesizes ethical themes of life research, themes of narrative privilege, media, and evaluative criteria. He then illustrates how these themes influence narrative inquiry.

Tension plagues the relationship between the author and his father when it comes to golf- and gay-related issues. The author is also stuck between two canonical stories, one that says he must work things out to fulfill his responsibilities as a son and another that tells him to let go, to realize that he “can’t choose his relatives,” and to view the relationship as a waste of time. In this project, the author uses a relational paradigm to reframe the father-son relationship in which he finds himself immersed. He’s a victim, so is his father. He’s an oppressor, so is his father. They victimize and oppress together, simultaneously hurting and being hurt while never deciding to quit. The story is about the troubled relationship that separates them. It’s a story of sexuality and sport, of gayness and hegemonic masculinity, of a fag and his golf clubs. It’s a story of love and hate.

In this article, the authors provide a context for, and an introduction to, the contributions in this special issue on sons and fathers. After alluding to the rich heritage of literature on sons and fathers, the authors propose three themes that run through this collection: the continuing significance of son-father relationships, the act of writing such relationships into being, and the “clunky intimacy” conveyed. They follow this with an outline of the lines of inquiry contained within each of the subsequent articles, and conclude by drawing attention to the absences left within and by this issue.