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Mothers, Faggots, and Witnessing (Un)Contestable Experience

Northeastern Illinois University, tony.e.adams{at}gmail.com

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.

Key Words: autoethnography • experience • writing • misogyny • sexuality

This version was published on October 1, 2009

Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Vol. 9, No. 5, 619-626 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1532708609339488


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