Heightened Performative Autoethnography

A Nomenclature for Critical Autoethnography in the Arena of Disciplinary Atomization

“…differences such as those regarding ideology, religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, and (dis)ableness” so as to perceive and treat “all people as free and equal and thus deserving of the same distribution of material value such as income and housing, affective considerations such as respect, and opportunities such as education and health care” (also cf. Sughrua, 2016, p. 57). What channels this social justice–oriented attitude on the part of the autoethnographer is not patronization nor exoticization.…”

“…“Dramaturgical” refers to a written, oral, acted out, or displayed (e.g., as in a photograph or art exhibition) representation of a “real,” “imagined,” or “combined real and imagined” happening, occurrence, or event which is based on time, place, and action engaged in by a character or characters and/or the narrator and which hence takes the form of a “story” directly utilizing or somehow evoking literary-like conventions such as scene, dialogue, and characterization (Barkhuizen, 2008, p. 232; Sughrua, 2016, p. 14). In contrast, academic or scholarly writing is usually noncontingent in that it does not directly or immediately evoke a specific lived situation.…”

“…When the audience has already been made cognizant of an intended topic such as the hegemonic effects of standardized assessment in elementary education or “receives direct indication of this topic “or infers cues” of it “at the onset or during the moment it reads, hears, observes, or otherwise experiences the story” or dramaturgical event; when the story or event is “purposefully set on demonstrating, rendering, or otherwise acting out (as opposed to directly explaining or expositorily developing)” this topic; when the audience reciprocates by sensorially interpreting (as opposed to being “informed of”) this topic; and when these conditions are met, there occurs rhetorical performativity (Sughrua, 2016, p. 6). This performativity is provided by the dramaturgical dimension of the autoethnographic paper and given accentuation by the academic or scholarly dimension.…”

“…above) this theme stressing the mandate to overcome or at least learn to live with painful experiences. The performance in Kien (2013), as described by Sughrua (2016, pp. 33-34), resembles a “Beckett-like one-act play.” At the start and end of the dramatized paper, Kien (2013) is seen lying on his bed at 6:30 a.m., wide awake.…”

“…In his monologue, Kien (a) returns to a past moment of presenting a paper at an academic conference; (b) goes further back to reliving the experience described in the conference paper, that of sitting at a table in an outdoor café in Seoul, as a Korean woman in the company of an American soldier walk past, while he (Kien) oddly senses that the soldier somehow poses a danger for the woman; (c) goes further back in the past to when he was informed of his sister’s murder at the hands of her domestic partner; (d) moves forward or up in time to, again, his presentation of the paper at the conference; (e) drops back down again to the Seoul scene; and (f) returns again to the paper presentation, which relates how his impression that the Korean woman faced an impending danger and that he himself was unable to prevent it was influenced by the trauma he felt over his sister’s murder (Kien, 2013; also cf. Sughrua, 2016). After recounting the paper presentation, Kien’s monologue returns to the present moment of Kien lying on his back in bed.…”