Speaking as (Significant) Othered

Amy and Christina sat together in their living room. Amy held her phone, scrolling through notes she had typed a few minutes before their meeting. Christina's laptop lay open in front of her.

"How do we start this?" Amy asks. "Do we need an abstract?"

Christina smirks, "I don't know if we need it right now. Even if we do, I never start by writing the abstract."

"Then how do we start?" Amy asks again, anxiously.

"I think we can begin with what we bring to the table for this conversation about queer autoethnography: We are a queer couple in academia who often write duo/autoethnographies. It's our chance to conceptualize how we view queer duo/autoethnography."

"Do you think our relationship is what makes our duo/autoethnography queer? Or is it us creating a co-constructed narrative that's hard to identify where you end and I begin?"

"I can see that. Before we fully dive into how we conceive queer duo/autoethnography, how do you see queer autoethnography functioning?"

"At the intersection of autoethnography and queer theory, 'just stories' are transformed and transformative as insurrectionary acts that offer revolt through juxtaposition.¹ Queering autoethnography interrogates the idea that narratives not only become stories upon the body, but also storied upon various theoretical frameworks that suggest possible lenses for decoding the author/s' experiences. Readers are simultaneously offered insight into the residuals of the positionality of the scholar. It becomes an issue of 'what is being read?' in conjunction with 'what is supposed to be read?'"

________

"Does this make sense?" Amy looks up from her phone, a concerned look on her face.²

"Yeah, that definition works well. Who said that?"

"Oh, that's mine, I just wrote it."

"Oh, baby," Christina says reassuringly. "That is beautiful. We need to make sure to add a meta moment here so that the reader knows that is you."

Amy begins to tear up, the vulnerability of sharing her scholarly writing mounting. "I was just working with what had been suggested in other readings," she says as she shifts uncomfortably. Christina knows her compliment motivates Amy's sudden uneasiness, something Amy has never handled well. Joking, Amy adds, "The fact that you understood my writing is further proof that autoethnography is the way I was meant to write and contribute as a scholar."

Framework

Queer autoethnography stylistically pushes the bright line between critical/cultural scholarship and poetics, often assuming the shape and identity of both/and—stories are present but disguised within the present(ed) work.³ Our work plays with the queer temporality of time as we offer our thoughts on these pages—present within your current reading and discussion.

In particular, we engage in queer duo/autoethnography, not as a mere "research tool," but rather as "a way of living in a contingent and uncertain curriculum of self-accountability and reflexivity."⁴ For us, queer duo/autoethnography functions as a means of capturing and reflecting on how we story each other and our relationship. Through our methodological play and accounting for our storied selves, we challenge the elasticity of duo/autoethnography in queering work that somewhat systematically "acts as if, rather than is" whereas the work "advocates for troubl[ing]" systemic assumptions regarding both methodology and identity.⁵ In other words, queer duo/autoethnography empowers the idea of revisionism: By working together, we must agree on which stories to tell and how to tell them.

________

"I think Alcoff also works well here," Amy suggests.

"Yes, I remember you mentioning that. I'll pull up Alcoff's Speaking for Others and look over it quickly as a refresher."⁶

"I think instead of speaking for others, I think we're speaking as othered. . . ."

"Wait," Christina interrupts. She struggled at times to keep up with Amy's racing thoughts. "Right now, you're starting with point 'D,' when we need to start with point 'A.' You could probably not only tell me how Alcoff fits here, but also give me the page numbers of the citations we should use...