Telling Stories: Reflexivity, Queer Theory, and Autoethnography

Abstract

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.