Mothers, Faggots, and Witnessing (Un)Contestable Experience

In: Cultural studies - critical methodologies, Band 9, Heft 5, S. 619-626

Abstract

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.