I hate chicken breast: a tale of resisting stories and disembodied knowledge construction

Abstract

In this performance autoethnography, the author explores the simultaneity of telling and resisting stories of lived experience. In the process, the author constructs the notion of “resisting stories” as autoethnographic narratives that both resist and demand telling in the process of making themselves public. In the process the author engages in a dialog with Della Pollock’s article “The Performative I.” He tries to re-present accounts of growing up poor through his experiences of class, race, and gender. From an eating/not eating moment he tries to create resisting stories; resisting alcoholism, resisting patriarchal structures with love and anger, resisting disembodied knowledge construction that still tends to reproduce the very oppression it intends to challenge, and resisting narrative that defies the “existence” of a broken family living in a vacuum.

Keywords:

• autoethnography
• resisting stories
• knowledge construction
• father
• chicken

Notes

1. This performance would not exist as it is without Della Pollock’s The Performative “I.” I draw more than inspiration and insight from her work. I felt empowered and secure. I borrow not only words, but sections of her work. Somehow, I thought and still think that in associating my words with hers, nobody could/can hurt me. Then in a direct and explicit way, I am following Della Pollock’s steps; I am walking down the path, through the doors that her words opened for me.

2. The annual conference promoted by the National Communication Association.

3. For a longer and complete version of this explanation of performance autoethnography, please see Diversi and Moreira (2009, 187–90).

4. “Performance studies is uniquely suited for the challenge of braiding together disparate and stratified ways of knowing. We can think through performance along three crisscrossing lines of activity and analysis. We can think of performance (1) as work of imagination, as an object of study; (2) as a pragmatics of inquiry (both as model and method), as an optic and operation of research; (3) as a tactics of intervention, an alterative space of struggle … we often refer to the three a’s of performance studies: artistry, analysis, activism. Or to change the alliteration, a commitment to the three c’s of performance studies: creativity, critique, citizenship (civic struggles for social justice)” (Conquergood 2002, 152).

5. An early version of this manuscript that I presented at NCA in Chicago, IL.

6. I believe it is important to present Trinh T. Minh-ha’s whole idea to make my point: “They should be distinguished from the differences grasped both between and within entities, each of these being understood as multiple presences. Not One, not two either. ‘I’ is, therefore, not a unified subject, a fixed identity, or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities one has gradually to peel off before one can see its true face. ‘I’ is, itself, infinite layers. Its complexity can hardly be conveyed through such typographic conventions as I, i, or I/i. Thus, I/i am compelled by the will to say/unsay, to resort the entire gamut of personal pronouns to stay near this fleeing and static essence of Not-I. Whether I accept or not, the natures of I, i, you, s/he, We, we, they, and wo/man constantly overlap. They all display a necessary ambivalence, for the line dividing I and Not-I, us and them, or him and her is not (cannot) always (be) as clear as we would like it to be. Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak. Of all the layers that form the open (never finite) totality of ‘I,’ which is to be filtered out as superfluous, fake, corrupt, and which is to be captured, true, real, genuine, authentic? Which, indeed, since all interchange, revolving in a endless process? (According to the context in which they operate, the superfluous can become real; the authentic can prove fake; and so on.) Authenticity as a need to rely on an ‘undisputed origin,’ is prey to an obsessive fear: that of losing a connection. Everything must hold together. In my craving for a logic of being, I cannot help but loathe the treats of interruptions, disseminations, and suspensions. To begin, to develop to a climax, then, to end. To fill, to join, to unify. The order and the links create an illusion of continuity, which I highly prize for fear of nonsense and emptiness. Thus, a clear origin will give me a connection back through time, and I shall, by all means, search for that genuine layer of myself to which I can always cling. To abolish it in such a perspective is to remove the basis, the prop, the overture, or the finale – giving thereby free rein to indeterminacy: the result, forefeared, is either an anarchic succession of climaxes or a de(inex)pressive, uninterrupted monotony – and to enter into the limitless process of interactions and changes that nothing will stop, not even death. In other words, things may be said to be what they are, not exclusively in relation to each other’s immediate presences and to themselves as non/presences. The real, nothing else than a code of representation, does not (cannot) coincide with the lived or the performed. This is what Vine Deloria, Jr. accounts for when he exclaims: ‘Not even Indians can relate themselves to this type of creature who, to anthropologists, is the “real Indian.” A realistic identification with such a code has, therefore, no reality whatsoever: It is like “stopping the ear while trying to steal the bell’” (Chinese saying)”(Minh-ha 1989, 89–94).

7. Bryant Alexander’s performance in the NCA preconference on reconciling reflexivity in ethnography was entitled, “Standing in the wake: a critical auto/ethnographic exercise on reflexivity” and has been published (2011) in a Special Issue of Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies.