A mirror of her own: Anais Nin's autobiographical performances

On Being Amorphous: Autoethnography, Genealogy, and a Multiracial Identity

“…How the subject found the information and what he or she did with it are equally important. Elyse Pineau's (1992Pineau's ( , 2001 work presents this tension between the auto-and the ethno-well. First, through an interrogation of the tension between text and performance, and then through an interrogation of the differential immediacies of writing versus performing, Pineau put us into the heart of autoethnographic tension without ever using that phrase.…”

“…Writing of the "ongoing, public, and collective enactment" of an individual identity, Pineau (1992) made a distinction between a performance of identity that "maintains a certain critical distance from [one's] work" and one in which the performer works "actively to blur her identities as author and subject" (pp. 98-99).…”

The First Disciple: A Generative Autobiographical Performance From an Ethnographic Field

“…Describing generative autobiography as a compositional strategy for autobiographical performance, Alexander explained that in this form, "audience members become practical collaborators" between that which they experience and their own life scripts (Alexander, 2000, p. 99). Even though the personal narratives in my field were neither staged, ritualized, nor aesthetically performed, I was invited in (and felt invited in) as an audience to "re-perform in (my) mind similarly felt experience" (see Pelias, 1992; see also Alexander, 2000;Pineau, 1992). In his essay, "Skin Flint (or, The Garbage Man's Kid): A Generative Autobiographical Performance Based on Tami Spry's Tattoo Stories," Alexander (2000) detailed multiple features and components of generative autobiography that has its roots in the linguistic approach to generative grammar devised by Noam Chomsky.…”