Abstract
In this chapter I enter into a necessarily uncomfortable conversation about the ethics of our work as critical autoethnographers. Questions of ethics in self-Other research are everywhere but often times ignored, made invisible and/or erased and in this chapter I draw upon past and present moments in my work as then ethnographer and ethnomusicologist and now critical autoethnographer where the material and affective dimensions of writing words and worlds becomes ethical. The promise that Cixousian and Woolfian ethics hold for resisting autoethnographic writing which invades, alienates, pacifies and objectifies are considered and a different kind of wise and loving attentiveness to difference and alterity in critical autoethnography is imagined.
If I choose to publish books, that’s my own look out. I musttake the consequences.
Woolf (2002, p. 69)
But the balance between truth and fantasy must be careful.
Woolf ([Diary entry 22 October, 1927], 1980, p. 162)
Where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?
Woolf (1929/2001, p. 29)
It was impossible to make head or tail of it, I decided…my own notebook rioted with the wildest of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.
Woolf (1929/2001, p. 35)
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Mackinlay, E. (2019). Writing, an Ethical Conversation. In: Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04669-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04669-9_10
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