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This essay explores our collaborative work as connective, constitutive, and comforting. Calling upon the poetic and performative, we describe our relational dynamic as a loving presence that comes together for the gifts of our collaborations. The essay ends with a reflection on our presentation at the 14th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry after Tami Spry stood in for Lesa Lockford when Lesa was unable to attend.

The essays in this Critical Intervention forum continue work on posthumanism in performance studies where the elemental performance tools of body, word, and thing activate studies in materialism, vital materialities, and engagement with non/human others. Through methods of performative writing, these works assist in deepening our potential to understand the intersections of art, materiality, and political intervention.

Focusing on our interactions with visual art as posthuman performance, this piece explores how Jane Bennett’s “vibrant materiality” moves us into a radical relationality with art and processes of grief. Performance studies’ enduring plumb into the deep ecology of body-page-body-stage makes us particularly equipped to see what else we might know of being in semantic-somatic multimatter knowing.

A reader senses when they encounter the writing of a distinguished scholar who engages the depth and breadth of interacting disciplines. The writing speaks with the reader rather than to them. Word...

I am searching for a labor of reflexivity in performative autoethnography that represents the Other with the same kind of commitment as is afforded the self. This essay seeks to explore the sociocultural complexities of engaging the Other in autoethnography.

“Something,” writes Kathleen Stewart, “throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation; something both animated and inhabitable.” Ordinary Affects is socioculturally vibrational, imagining the personally political even further. The following essay offers a collection of affectively heuristic “moments.”

That so many hegemonic constructs have been devised to exoticize and belittle beauty should be evidence enough that something about beauty is devastating to power, something just below the skin. And in revealing patriarchy’s sleight of hand, we may begin to see that beauty is skin, deep as skin, moving into muscle, bone, marrow. This essay seeks to explore beauty as a critical praxis; not a gender-only matrix, beauty’s critical strength is in the conscious sociocultural construction of bodies, their colors, shapes, sizes, and abilities. Beauty as a critical praxis is a personally, politically, willfully wanton utopian performative. That so many hegemonic constructs have been devised to exoticize and belittle beauty should be evidence enough that something about beauty is devastating to power, something just below the skin. And in revealing patriarchy’s sleight of hand, we may begin to see that beauty is skin, deep as skin, moving into muscle, bone, marrow. This essay seeks to explore beauty as a critical praxis; not a gender-only matrix, beauty’s critical strength is in the conscious sociocultural construction of bodies, their colors, shapes, sizes, and abilities. Beauty as a critical praxis is a personally, politically, willfully wanton utopian performative.

This essay critically reflects upon a performative autoethnography presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2014; it also constitutes a continuation of a previous performative autoethnography presented at ICQI 2012, “Unseating the Myth of a Girl and Her Horse, Now That's True Grit.” In writing and performing this essay through the method of the textualizing body, as well as critically reflecting upon it here and now post performance, I find the process of embodiment offered through performance pushes me into a different understanding about the complexities concerning the cultural problematics brought about by “beauties, barmaids, and ballbusters” of the (old) West. The performative-I process revealed a simultaneous rejection and recuperation of these stock characters, revealing a futurity of gender possibilities though utopian performatives.

Robin M. Boylorn's Sweetwater caused me to examine stereotypes that claw at my own background—deeply racist aunts and uncles refused to think beyond an ignorance of the other, allowing them to find some class-based solace in relation to their own feelings of sociocultural worthlessness. In the tradition of good scholarship, Robin's work invites me to unnerve my own whitegirlness, to unsettle this racially reifying practice and, with all of the pedagogical potentiality of performance, hopefully, to engage a conversation privileging a continued critical and communal reflexivity.

In this article we record, recount, and reflect on a 48-hour period in which we hang out in a rented house beside a lake with the intention of writing collaboratively. The writing emerges out of conversations. Our exchanges move back and forth and sideways between talking, writing, reading, and responding to each other’s writing. These exchanges are held together and created through cooking, eating, going to the pub, walking, making cocktails, singing, and arguing. This is a narrative account, in real/chronological time of a collaborative process of generating this writing. As such these are the raw, unedited texts. Our process includes three instances of talking, writing, and reading. We offer this as a backstage snapshot of collaborative writing.

This essay addresses and critiques attempts by politicians to legislate the language used to describe and therefore define women’s experience of sexual assault. What is written from the body changes the body and vice versa; what is performed turns back on itself changing word and body. Rep. Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta) wants to label me “accuser,” thereby erasing my assaulted body unless and until “there’s a conviction in the matter.” There was never a conviction in the matter of my case. So where does that leave me? He doesn’t want me to claim victimage, as if being a victim is somehow a privilege, a legal labeling granted on “proof” of the attack. The assaulted body is changed by the legal replacement of “victim” for “accuser.” The word tries to displace or erase the action from the agent and replace it with a burden of proof. So following a most heinous experience, as “accuser,” the woman must now carry the burden of proving herself, accounting not only for her own experience, but also, that it actually happened. Performative autoethnography offers a method of intervening upon legislated language assaults by speaking from the body with agency and ethical representation. The possibilities of deconstructing “accuser” and reconstructing research that offers a multiplicity of being in the body of assault offers argument to oppressive gender notions of violence. Performative autoethnography offers hope and efficacy in the doing.

This performative autoethnography utilizes jazz swing as a method to further activate the critical processes in qualitative research. In reflecting on my father’s 25 years as a jazz musician, I find his everyday lived methodology of swing provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which family inheritance collides with sociocultural practices of racial inequity and cultural appropriation. Autoethnographically re/inhabiting this space and sound with my father revealed a performative ethos, an empathetic epistemology of critical reflection activated by the transgressive discipline of jazz. Specifically, this performative ethos is applied to issues of racial accountability, embodied theorizing, and the ethical implications of an aesthetic/epistemic praxis in autoethnography. More broadly, I offer performative ethos as critical pedagogy assisting in living a critical life where issues of power and privilege are personally political and are written and rewritten daily with others in hope of utopia.

Qualitative researchers are aptly positioned to address issues implicated in the politics of evidence in scholarship. Autoethnography in particular carries important methodological implications for how the body is sited in what constitutes knowledge, evidence, and the evidence of knowledge. I argue that if autoethnography is epistemic, then the evidence of how we know what we know must reside in the aesthetic crafting of critical reflexion upon the body-as-evidence. As we develop “post” methodologies we may be in danger of expecting the personal or emotional to stand in for literary acumen. Performative autoethnography resides in the intersections of knowledge construction and art, in the aesthetic articulation of the performative body, in a personally political reflection whose evidence is an epistemic/aesthetic praxis. I utilize autoethnographic writing on loss and hope to operationalize the epistemic/aesthetic praxis as an ethical imperative for performative autoethnography.

This essay offers a continuation of the dialogue of desire proposed by Anna Deavere Smith and Cornell West to find a language that speaks the complexity of race while simultaneously creating supportive productive diverse communities. As a white performative autoethnographer, a methodological skepticism of language's ability to represent race seems a critically productive space to speak into this desire. In our racialized copresence with one another, how does language function to perpetuate racial hegemonies, and then, how can autoethnography performatively interrupt hegemonic practices for the purpose of reimagining and repositioning agency? What follows are fragmented responses to that question, refracted critical self-reflexions representing my own struggle to construct pieces of the language that Smith and West speak of.

The “crisis of representation” in the social sciences and humanities was not so much a crisis for performance studies artist/scholars as it was a recognition of a familiar. Our disciplinary roots a...

We are made of words. (Joy Harjo) “I wonder if we become the body we are given?” Heidi Rose's question echoes in my mind within the vast and garish ballroom at the Chicago Hilton where she has been...

This is a gnarly question—our favorite kind. We would like to question the question, or at least one of its premises. Rather than addressing the limits posed (reflexively) by “Dame Rhetoric” and he...

Like many other experiences that have the potentiality of empowerment for girls, the physical, intellectual, and emotional strength required in working with horses gets reduced to a facile anthropomorphized Disneyesque romance. In reality, it is a nuanced negotiation of muscle and sway. As a girl, Westerns offered me an empowering image of women and horses. This article seeks to track the complexity of some of those connections.

This article argues the personal/professional/political emancipatory potential of autoethnographic performance as a method of inquiry. Autoethnographic performance is the convergence of the “autobiographic impulse” and the “ethnographic moment” represented through movement and critical self-reflexive discourse in performance, articulating the intersections of peoples and culture through the innersanctions of the always migratory identity. The article offers evaluative standards for the autoethnographic performance methodology, calling on the body as a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy. Autoethnographic performance makes us acutely conscious of how we “ Iwitness” our own reality constructions. Interpreting culture through the self-reflections and cultural refractions of identity is a defining feature of autoethnographic performance.

This essay and accompanying script describe the author's search for a mode of scholarship suitable for the expression of passion and spirit within the communal narrative of academe.

In this collaborative autoethnography, the five of us explore the experience and ethics of writing—and living—from/in intensity. We have been writing together since meeting at the Third International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI), when we made a commitment to write over the following year to, for, and with each other. It became an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, exploring questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing, a series of texts exchanged via e-mail. This essay's sequence of writing during July and August 2008 follows a period of silence. Senses of intensities emerged from our collaborative autoethnographic practice over this period: We remain unsure of what intensities might be, and in the fluidity of this lack of certainty we feel we can claim a pedagogical practice of inquiry that comes from this writing into our always not-yet-known.

Five scholars, with varying histories together, met as writers at a workshop at the 2007 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and made a commitment to write over the following year to, for and with each other in an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, an experiment that led us to explore questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing. Each year since then we have returned to Congress to read a small anthology of the year's writing—and to decide whether or not to continue. This paper is drawn from our third year of writing together across the changing distances, as our bodies moved and lay still in both unfamiliar and familiar spaces. Within castles and beside oceans, on pastures and in homes, at universities and hospitals, we wrote together, between and amongst our group of five, working, as always, it seems, at who and what we are becoming. The joy of our continuing writing presence in each others' lives, our pleasure and surprise at such friendship, earned through hard writing labor, is manifest alongside an awareness that there is always more to do. We turn and return to love and intimacy as scholarly, messy, complex methodology as we send writing to each other that we, in turn, pick up on—and sometimes do not—in our responses; writing that often affirms and sometimes disturbs.

These three scholars met during the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI) in 2005 when they were put on a panel together for autoethnography. They understand QI as a space of compassionate scholarship. In their text, they allude to Norman Denzin's performance of compassion and his intellectual dream that, accurately, has generated not only the beginning but, more importantly, the continuation and development of such a space. The authors understand their work at QI as personally and politically transformational, allowing a continual critical engagement of how meaning is made in contexts with others. Using their own journeys at QI as the theorizing tool, they conceptualize QI as a radicalizing space of pedagogy and scholarship.

Having written as a group for four years, we continue with an emblematic methodology of writing into the dark, writing into a space that has become an intensive, maturing, messy, ethically caring, collaborative venture of changing composition. Our collective self writes into a tentative anticipating trust in our presence though we are shaded in uncertainty. We have written with desire and labor, intimacy and work, stuttering and stumbling our way through what has been a vibrant and aging transatlantic writing group. And now we have come to the perhaps inevitable question about whether we want to continue writing together. This installment traces the complexity of that question.