Craig Gingrich-Philbrook

Autoethnography's Family Values: Easy Access to Compulsory Experiences

This essay outlines one trajectory through autoethnographys embattled terrain at a specific historical/personal moment. The essay begins with an appreciation of autoethnography, at least as compared to its positivist alternatives, but also articulates a suspicion of autoethnographys pursuit of legitimacy. Here, the author articulates the double bind between the epistemic and aesthetic demands of autoethnography and autoethnographic performance. The essay closes by articulating strategies to resist the “family values” of everyday discourse that privilege values of transparency over indeterminacy.

Revenge of the dead subject: The contexts of Michael Bowman's Killing Dillinger

This essay offers critique of the call to specify the context of autoperformance, as if this context were not a construction. Michael Bowmans Killing Dillinger is used as an exemplar of auto‐performances ability to resist the dismissives that it “preaches to the converted” and “turns away from the other.”

Reprogramming the Stage: A Heuristic for Posthuman Performance

In this essay, we expand upon scholarly conversations concerning digital performance to demonstrate how performance studies’ current, primarily humanistic, paradigm for theorizing digital performance is due for an upgrade. We review how rigorous articulations of digital performance disrupt a hegemonic struggle between liveness and virtuality and suggest that ontologies associated with posthumanism may better serve performers, theorists, and audiences interested in exploring a more relationally framed “technocorporeal performance.” Finally, we offer three concepts for theorizing digital performance—terminal, network, and index—as ways to talk about such performance, using the example of one authors work.

Ambition Vs. Inflation in the Poetry of Jorie Graham: A Lesson for Autoperformance

Jorie Grahams poetry and critical reception offer a means for considering the relationship between literature and autoperformance. This essay (1) identifies three themes in criticism of Graham, (2) illustrates how these themes collectively enact a “creative double bind” between ambition and inflation in the lived experience of poetic composition, and (3) argues that attention to this double bind offers a way to perceive the force of address that makes autoperformance explicitly intersubjective rather than simply a narcissistic departure from literature.

On Gratitude, for My Father

The father’s day remembrances go up across Facebook, released like doves at a funeral or little fires set in paper boats and pushed out into the way time flows and eddies. Something rises in an up-draft, something circles and burns on the surface in the dark.

Removed, and Making Do

The author considers the metaphorical implications and productivity of identity erasure in blind review. Specifically, he notes the potential and limitations of gay identity erasure, as the practice relates to gay confessions featured in the poetry of Ragan Fox.

Coming Unhinged: A Twice-Told Multivoiced Autoethnography:

This story tells about an accident that occurred at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The first author presents her autoethnography of her partner’s fall and her subsequent reaction. Then to complicate and deepen her telling, she crafts a second multivoiced account from the responses of eight people who were part of the event. The participants’ stories are juxtaposed to tell a multivoiced tale and to theorize what happened in an experience-near mode. Twice-told multivoiced autoethnography brings other voices, subjectivities, and interpretations into our autoethnographic accounts, providing a collective consciousness and offering the possibility of initiating conversations about the values of care and empathy connected with the project of autoethnography.

On the execution of the young giraffe, Marius, by the Copenhagen Zoo: Conquergood’s “Lethal Theatre” and posthumanism

ABSTRACT The author uses the work of Dwight Conquergood and posthumanist analysis to frame the killing of the young giraffe, Marius, by the Copenhagen Zoo as an execution. In doing so, he deploys the work of Irus Braverman to demonstrate the imbrication of humans, animal others, and technology in discourses of management of biopower and breeding value to pose the queer observation that it is none of our obligation to breed in captivity.

ACT UP as a Structure of Feeling

[F]eeling is a byproduct of a precise arrangement of circumstances. Revisiting ACT UP restarts the ‘‘panic of loss’’ characterizing my youth. With few exceptions, death remained at a physical remove from me, but it took theorists, artists, and performers whose work made me feel less alone, registering in my psyche and praxis as the equivalent of ash. I felt that panic intensely one afternoon, discovering David Wojnarowicz’s obituary in Art in America. An impoverished graduate student taking the bit of alienation, I sank to Waldenbooks’ floor, catching my breath, uncertain how to proceed. Could I afford the magazine? Earlier, I’d spent too long scraping the residue out of an empty jar of peanut butter to smear on a stale rice cake. In the end, I charged it, praying for approval. I felt panic rekindle as censorship of Wojnarowicz resurged, 19 years after his death. The Smithsonian recently withdrew his video ‘‘A Fire in My Belly’’ from the show Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, caving to ‘‘protests from a right-wing Catholic group and members of Congress,’’ disappearing him again. The 25th anniversary of ACT UP means our fragile planet occupies the same orbital position it did when an enunciation formalized a feeling of being fucked, without protection, by government, the medico-pharmaceutical complex, and ‘‘the’’ church. But if that fuckery surprised ACT UP’s founders or anyone else, then we hadn’t paid attention. We failed to consider Raymond Williams’s structure of feeling,

“Just a bunch of therapy”: challenging the dismissive

ABSTRACT The author reflects on the legacy of Leland H. Roloff as a resource for challenging the dismissive speech act that a given performance is “just a bunch of therapy.” He offers three consequences of this dismissive.