This article argues the personal/professional/political emancipatory potential of autoethnographic performance as a method of inquiry. Autoethnographic performance is the convergence of the “autobiographic impulse” and the “ethnographic moment” represented through movement and critical self-reflexive discourse in performance, articulating the intersections of peoples and culture through the innersanctions of the always migratory identity. The article offers evaluative standards for the autoethnographic performance methodology, calling on the body as a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy. Autoethnographic performance makes us acutely conscious of how we “ Iwitness” our own reality constructions. Interpreting culture through the self-reflections and cultural refractions of identity is a defining feature of autoethnographic performance.

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Qualitative researchers are aptly positioned to address issues implicated in the politics of evidence in scholarship. Autoethnography in particular carries important methodological implications for how the body is sited in what constitutes knowledge, evidence, and the evidence of knowledge. I argue that if autoethnography is epistemic, then the evidence of how we know what we know must reside in the aesthetic crafting of critical reflexion upon the body-as-evidence. As we develop “post” methodologies we may be in danger of expecting the personal or emotional to stand in for literary acumen. Performative autoethnography resides in the intersections of knowledge construction and art, in the aesthetic articulation of the performative body, in a personally political reflection whose evidence is an epistemic/aesthetic praxis. I utilize autoethnographic writing on loss and hope to operationalize the epistemic/aesthetic praxis as an ethical imperative for performative autoethnography.

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