An Adoptee Autoethnographic Femifesta

An Adoptee Autoethnographic Femifesta

Anne Harris Abstract This femifesta, based in the lived experience of adoptees, calls for an autoethnography that moves beyond humanist and evaluative concerns. Keywords: adoption, adoptees, more-than-human, femifesta, performance, personal-as-political

Everything starts as a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Every political movement begins as a counter-narrative to an existing narrative. . . . If we’re living in a post-facts world – let’s have better stories. . . . A long time ago . . . I realised that I needed to read myself as a fiction as well as a fact. The facts weren’t looking good for me – I had nothing and I was nothing. And I thought that if I understood myself as a story I might do better, because if I am the story I can change the story. To change the way we are telling the story of our country, the story of our world, does need more than facts. The facts aren’t working – that much is for sure. (Winterson, 2016) Let our bodies float. (Behar, 2013, p. 183) Hickey-Moody (2016) ‘mobilizes the manifesto/manifesta/femifesta as a genre of feminist scholarship’ (p. 258) which as a feminist modality bridges scholarship with popular culture, sociality, and the personal-as-political. Think Haraway (1991), Riot Grrrls, and the Jigsaw Manifesto (Lusty, 2008, 2015). A femifesta is a resistant call to action which I extend here to autoethnographers, that autoethnography moves beyond humanist roots into a way of ‘doing’ performative and narrative assemblages of human/more-than-human, truth/more-than-truth, and theory/more-than-theory. We live in a time of ubiquitous autoethnographies: personal, performative, and cultural accounts of (often) minoritarian storytellers from queer, trans*, racialized, religious, gendered, refugee, asylum seeker, Palestinian, feminist, Indigenous, and countless other perspectives through whose eyes we are offered a different and often painful view of our world as well as countless Others who continue to be

International Review of Qualitative Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 24–28. ISSN 1940-8447, eISSN 1940-8455. © 2017 International Institute for Qualitative Research, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2017.10.1.24.

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systematically violated, ignored, or erased in/from the ‘record’, despite telling our stories. These stories are all around us. Stories that tell truths too hard and complex to represent with a meme, and their counter-stories that claim they are all lies. But rather than floating on these stories and being carried by them, we are drowning in this sea of stories. By and large, the general population ignores them all. So it is not a lack of individual stories, evocative stories, performed in/through/with us (Holman Jones, 2005a, 2005b, 2016) that is the problem. Adoptees are used to such layers upon layers of stories and people’s inability to be moved by them. Distance (perceived or real) promises to keep the heart safe, yet humanity drowns with it. Even when we harden our hearts to nonhuman subjects (dogs, cats, homes, objects), the cost to our humanity is the same (Holman Jones & Harris, 2016). Such stories are universal graphies and are always written: in paint, spaces, movements, nature, flight, relationships, words, breath, and performing bodies (Harris & Holman Jones, 2016). Stories are not just tales, and graphies are not just black marks on pages. For adoptees, the very term autoethnography presents a complication. Ethno is something we have often been decontextualised from (Holman Jones, 2005a, 2011). Auto is what has been stolen from us. Graphy is how we stay alive. For adoptees, writing becomes inventing, not recording or evoking. This story-writing is a creative act, a political act, an act of survival. But what is the I and what is the culture of whom we write for those (like adoptees) who can never be known. As I have written elsewhere, ‘For adoptees, going home is impossible’ (Harris, 2015, p. 162), as is Cynthia Dillard’s (2006) call to return to the homeland (either literally or figuratively). There is a freedom in that not knowing. A creative beauty. In the absence of real or specific or micro belonging, we resort to the macro belonging of being human. We turn to the broad culture of co-dwellers of this place and time (both human and nonhuman), and the universal vulnerability of the I. In this absence blooms a flower of political, creative, and (auto)ethnographic possibility. It reveals in new ways the impossibility that any anthropology, any ethnography, any systematic research of any culture, community, individual, or group was ever comprehensive, objective, or ‘true’. So let this be the adoptees’ gift to autoethnography, a femifesta from adoptees to everyone else: Always question your auto, as critically as we question ethno and graphy. Holman Jones (2002) offered an early theorisation of autoethnographic performance (through torch singing) as ‘how the body does and undoes’ (p. 44) affective experiences. It was not, she told us in that long-ago time, a critical project because it

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is analytical or resistant but because it is both a doing and an undoing. It is in the doing. It is – despite its auto – a doing together which is not reliant on notions of truth. Indeed Holman Jones tells us that the stories of torch and autoethnography are incomplete. They are partial, fragmented . . . [and] in performing ‘others,’ we discover how the body, heart, and mind does and undoes unrequited love or the experience of immigration or the dilemmas of doing fieldwork and writing ethnographic accounts. (p. 52) Like the scholarly practice of ethnocinema (Harris, 2012, 2014), autoethnography’s power is its coconstitutive nature, as a practice, and that through this shared research/creative activity, social change is enacted. The South Sudanese women with whom I worked in my doctoral studies and continue to work with have lost much of their stories and homes through civil war and the refugee experience, yet ‘recording’ their stories is no key toward social change or eradicating racism, war, genocide, rape, and the murder of women as a tool of war, or social class inequities. What does have the power to address these things is the relationship across perceived differences that autoethnographic (and ethnocinematic) research collaborations can initiate. Research as a doing, rather than as an output. So any femifesta that is politically and academically effective, I argue, must be a doing rather than a graphy, must go beyond the auto into the collective (particularly those collectives that continue to be erased by majoritarian practices), must go beyond a project of classifying or characterising ethnos into problematising the notion of culture itself (Harris, 2014). Home, like belonging, is an area of enquiry increasingly approached ‘affectively, materially, and symbolically’ (Chawla & Holman Jones, 2015, p. 180), as is autoethnography. An autoethnographic femifesta need not literalise any of its constituents: self, culture, or writing. A femifesta more usefully looks towards a queering of conclusivity itself. It reminds us that all calls to action are doings. If thinking is doing, if theory is practice, if individual is also collective, then Indigenous and decolonizing calls for more collectivist notions of autoethnography suggest the inseparability of the ‘I’ from the ‘we’ (Iosefo, 2016). Adoptees have been living this kind of autoethnography since the beginning. Because being adopted can mean quite the opposite of lost wandering individuals who strive to reconnect or rediscover some long-lost essentialising tribe from which they have been cast out, adoptee autoethnography is a way of seeing the world beyond individual lines, borders, affiliations. In our current historical moment of big data, unruly data, broken data, including autoethnographic accounts of unimaginable experiences the world

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over, we are somehow still not moved by these individual accounts to do something about the suffering of others. That tells me that even in the face of ‘facts’ and ‘personal accounts’, we need more. We need more to mobilise, to feel connected enough to act. In this regard, adoptees (and queers) are blessed. We already know that individuals are vulnerable, that collectives are required for survival. That we all rely upon the kindness of strangers, at some time, in some place, and for this if no other reason, we are accountable, we are collectively responsible to one another. And in this accountability, there is no us, them, or ‘what really happened’. We can’t afford that. So, to make a start: I was born a working-class cisgender girl To a mother earth that was struggling with her addictions, Whose home was being pulled apart. I grew up with the burden and privilege of queer whiteness, and my siblings were the abject, the release from majoritarian expectation, the release from singularity. . . . I found myself in an inchoate becoming, and in every other face all at once. I am the autoethnography of infinite yous. Let our bodies float in the sea of one another.

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Hickey-Moody, A. (2016). A femifesta for posthuman art education: Visions and becomings. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 258–266). Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Holman Jones, S. (2002). The way we were, are, and might be: Torch singing as autoethnography. In A. P. Bochner & C. Ellis (Eds.), Ethnographically speaking: Authoethnography, literature, and aesthetics (pp. 44–56). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Holman Jones, S. (2005a). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 763–791). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Holman Jones, S. (2005b). (M)othering loss: Telling adoption stories, telling performativity. Text and Performance Quarterly, 25, 113–135. doi:10.1080/10462930500122716 Holman Jones, S. (2011). Lost and found. Text and Performance Quarterly, 31, 322–341. doi: 10.1080/10462937.2011.602709 Holman Jones, S. (2016). Living bodies of thought: The ‘‘critical’’ in critical autoethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 22, 228–237. doi:10.1177/1077800415622509 Holman Jones, S., & Harris, A. (2016). Traveling skin: A cartography of the body. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 12(1). Retrieved from http://liminalities.net/12-1/ skin.pdf Iosefo, F. (2016). Who is eye? An autoethnographic view on higher educational spaces from a Pasifika girl. In e. emerald, R. E. Rinehart, & A Garcia (Eds.), Global south ethnographies: Minding the senses (pp. 199–208). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense. Lusty, N. (2008). Sexing the manifesto: Mina Loy, feminism and futurism. Women: A Cultural Review, 19, 245–260. doi:10.1080/09574040802413834 Lusty, N. (2015, June 3). Beyond repair: Feminist manifestos and the idiom of rupture. Guest lecture presented at the Centre for Feminist Research, Goldsmiths University. Winterson, J. (2016, June 24). We need to build a new left. Labour means nothing today. The Guardian.

About the Author Anne Harris, PhD, is an associate professor and vice chancellor’s principal research fellow at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). She researches in the areas of creativity, ethnography, and gender/sexual diversities. She is the book series creator and editor of Creativity, Education, and the Arts (Palgrave) and has published more than 60 articles and nine books, including Creativity, Religion and Youth Cultures (Routledge, 2016).