I Always Knew…1
In one of my earliest memories I’m getting out of a car during the summer to go shopping with my mother at Kmart, the only store with toys within 30 minutes of my house. I’m so excited. I stand, peeling my legs from the vinyl front seat. It’s 1985 and a four-year-old sitting in the front seat without a seatbelt is acceptable in rural Maine. The seat is slick from the sweat that has pooled under me. I roll up the window per my mother’s instruction. The air inside the car is hot and thick when the windows are up so I’m disappointed she won’t let me leave them down while we shop. If our car ever had air conditioning it doesn’t work anymore.
Today I feel proud of how I look. I’m not wearing the androgynous overalls that dominate my childhood wardrobe because my mother thinks their loose fit and undefined waist conceal my irregular gait. It’s finally too hot for them. Instead I have on white shorts with bows on the side and a pink Minnie Mouse tank top my aunt bought me. My hair is swept into two ponytails fastened by pink elastic bands. I feel pretty and airy so I’m walking a bit straighter, more confident than usual. I catch the eye of a woman holding her daughter’s hand. She’s staring at me sadly. She whispers something. My heart beats a little faster. I’m close enough to the store to see my reflection in the glass door. At four I’m aware of my body, how it feels to live my identity through it, and how culture responds to it. I’m so very aware.
Thirty-one years later I can still see my reflection in the large glass door as I approached that Kmart. I’m lithe and tan from hours swimming in the behind my house. I see my deep-set, dark eyes, and my grandmother’s nondescript, average Lafredo nose. (From the way my father talks about them, the Lafredo nose is preferable to the Malio or Tomassi noses in the family.) My dark brown hair reflects the sun. I also see what the mother and her daughter see. My back is slightly hunched, pushed forward to balance while walking with my feet facing each other. Looking down I see the fresh purple scars snaking up my calves. I realize that the first operation didn’t fix me. The doctors snipping and lengthening my heel cords (Achilles tendons) to drop my feet to the ground hasn’t altered my abnormal ity enough to compel people to notice my cute outfit before my gait. The full leg casts, followed by walking casts and six months of physical therapy, have eliminated the need for the clunky white braces that clutched from my ankles to my knees. I was overjoyed to be rid of them and the long socks that reduced chafing. It is only now that I realize that the absence of the braces hasn’t changed my daily reality as much as I’d hoped. My legs are still wracked with spasms that leave me screaming when my muscles finally revolt against the constant tightening tremors throughout the day. My appearance still attracts questioning, sad, and even repulsed gazes. The body I live through matters. I know that.
The Role of the Stories We Live in the Research We Do
I understood privilege , stigma , and marginalization before any of those words were part of my vocabulary. I knew the ongoing visceral, collaborative, and susceptible nature of identity and personal story before I knew what the words “visceral,” “collaborative,” and “susceptible” meant. I knew my understandings were inescapably dependent on my physical body moving through and experiencing the world. While my impressions are extremely personal, formed through my body’s interactions with others, they are also highly collaborative, my understandings dependent upon an ongoing struggle to comprehend meaning through my interactions with others. Our culture is made possible through our lived experiences with one another (Berry, 2012). And since identity and meaning surface through interacting bodies, they are inescapably susceptible to change through future interactions. For as long as I can remember, this understanding inspired me to tell my stories to others and to listen to theirs. I wanted to know how they lived identity, meaning, and understanding through their bodies and to tell them how I lived them through mine. I believed (and still do) that once we embrace our dependence on mortal bodies, our understanding’s dependence on our embodied interactions with others, and the susceptibility of even deeply embedded meanings to be dismantled through our body-to-body interactions, we can become more aware, open, and empathetic to each other’s experiences. Openness and empathy can compel us to resist fear and marginalization and fight for inclusivity and the valuing of one another. This begins by listening to and telling stories. Storytelling performance gives me hope for a safer world that supports and flexes around rather than rejects and marginalizes our vulnerable bodies. That is why I’m writing this book. It’s also why I’m a storytelling performance scholar, teacher, and artist.
This is a critical autoethnographic novel of personal storytelling performance as a pursuit of hyper-embodied positioning and social justice. Autoethnographic writing allows a researcher to situate her body in relation to others to comprehend cultural realities. It falls under the broader methodological umbrella of autoethnography that links “the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political” (Ellis , 2004, p. xix). Many scholars have thoughtfully explored autoethnography as a methodology (Bochner, 2012; Chang , 2008; Ellis & Bochner , 2000; Gingrich-Philbrook , 2006; Holman Jones , Adams , & Ellis , 2013). Boylorn and Orbe (2014) give the succinct definition of autoethnography as “cultural analysis through personal narrative” (p. 17). Analyses take on many forms, including creative nonfiction prose (see Ellis , 2004, 2009), performance scripts (see Spry , 2011), and poetry (see Faulkner , 2014). Methodologically, the term combines autobiography and ethnography, calling for the “turning of the ethnographic gaze inward on the self (auto), while maintaining the outward gaze of ethnography, looking at the larger context wherein self experiences occur” (Denzin , 1997, p. 227). A critical frame to an autoethnographic story attends to cultural power relations, recognizing how privilege , power, and difference influence our experience and response in the world (Adams , 2011; Alexander , 2006; Denzin , 2014; Diversi & Moreira, 2009; Holman Jones , 2005; Pelias , 2014; Poulos, 2013; Shoemaker , 2013; Spry , 2006, 2016; Toyosaki & Pensoneau-Conway , 2013). As performance of daily life , autoethnography is a reflexive performance of self, mapping how meanings and understandings surrounding identity surface and are struggled over through one’s lived, embodied experience. Critical autoethnographic stories not only uncover marginalization, stigma , and prejudice in our personal stories, but also look toward means to resist them. This is the focus of my research, teaching, and performance of personal storytelling. In this chapter I’ll explain the visceral, collaborative, and susceptible nature of personal storytelling performance. These components extend from our encounters in daily life, to qualitative research , to class learning objectives, to staged productions for diverse audience s. Telling, listening, and interpreting stories enables human beings to share experiences, to access how life is lived through bodies other than our own, and to pursue social justice through striving to create a culture where all bodies are offered the opportunities to reach their utmost potentials.
Our Bodies Perform for and with One Another in Culture
Personal Storytelling Performance is Visceral
Storytelling is embodied (Langellier & Peterson, 2004). A personal story is first lived through a body; identity and meaning surface through embodied interactions in the world. Storytelling comes from bodies, dependent on the lungs, vocal cords, tongue, and jaw muscles of the teller and the eyes, ears, and/or facial muscles of the listener responding. I use the term “visceral” because of its emphasis on sensations deep within the body. Visceral describes the organs in our abdomens, the stomach and intestines, our guts (Merriam-Webster, 2016). It also describes deep inward feelings, strong reactions based on emotion and personal intuition rather than intellect and reasoning. Visceral stems from the place where we feel hunger and fullness, the sinking of dread and disappointment, the fluttering of anxiety and attraction, and the swelling of hope and faith. The performance of personal storytelling is inescapably physical and intuitive. As our bodies move through the world, certain moments are made meaningful and we react. Interactions evoke feelings that compel us to set off those moments as worthy of reiteration . Storytelling is an instinctive compulsion. It is our way of performing who we are and what matters to us.
The attention to the visceral experience as a means of knowing stems from existential phenomenology and its focus on the flesh, blood, bone, and organs as the “foundations of consciousness” that engage with and are “transformed by the world” (Sobchack, 2004, p. 2). An existential phenomenological perspective emphasizes the body’s role in the creation of personal and cultural truth, power , and identity, all of which are contingent upon the living human tissues that allow us to experience our world—to feel, see, hear, smell, and touch and to be felt, seen, heard, smelled, and touched. As the founder of existential phenomenology Merleau-Ponty (1964) articulates, “The enigma is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself” (reprinted in Kearney & Rasmussen, 2001, p. 290). The body is at once the subject of its story, the vessel for telling, and its own audience , experiencing and reacting (both physically and emotionally) to the sound waves and physical expressions it creates for and with others.
According to Langellier and Peterson (2004), telling a story “is not a cognitive or reflective process for which the body is a container; before a story is conceived or performed for an other it is lived through the body as meaningful” (p. 9). Storytelling is inescapably visceral, instinctively performed from within the body as a means for the body to understand itself in relation to others within cultures through our ongoing performances of identity in the world.
As I attend to the visceral nature of personal storytelling, my focus on my body and its physical and emotion al sensations intensifies. The feeling of...