Keith Berry

Embracing the Catastrophe Gay Body Seeks Acceptance

This article examines the constitution of gay male identity through embodied performances in Steamworks, a gay male bathhouse in Chicago. Motivated by Kabat-Zinns (1990) Buddhist conceptualizations of catastrophe and mindfulness, I reflectively track the ways in which desirability influences disconnection and identity negotiation as it occurs within a pervasive, generalized, and highly influential conceptualization of the idealized gay male body. Personal narratives scan experiences at Steamworks in which my body—less than the “ideal”—matters to me and to others culturally. I use Butlers (1990) notion of performativity to propose stylized and normative ways in which subjectivity comes to be through uses of the body.

The Ethnographic Choice: Why Ethnographers Do Ethnography:

How do we reconcile the complex and subjective dimensions of ethnographic research as they pertain to ethnographers themselves? What is to be made of the compelling draw the ethnographic process tends to have on its researchers? This article uses hermeneutic phenomenology to examine how ethnographers’ lifeworlds make possible the doing of ethnographic research. I draw on moments from past research to argue for an inexorable link between lifeworlds and ethnography, which results in ethnographers being definitively, yet uniquely and contingently, “chosen” to live as ethnographers. This multilayered snapshot of ethnographic subjectivity seeks to embolden the reflective space necessary for promoting a fuller sense of accountability by ethnographers, a fuller understanding and awareness of the complexities inherent to ours and others’ ethnographic stories.

Implicated Audience Member Seeks Understanding: Reexamining the "Gift" of Autoethnography

Researchers have characterized autoethnography as a highly evocative and personalized mode of discourse that affects authors and their audiences. In this article, the author examines autoethnography by recalling experiences communicating with Tillmann-Healys (2005) “The State of Unions: Activism (and In-Activism) in Decision 2004,” an autoethnographic poem about recent U.S. election results, civic inactivity among gay men, and the need for their political engagement. Sparked by a philosophical goal more to understand and respond than to admonish and territorialize, the author uses hermeneutic phenomenology and narrative reflections to consider the complexities of autoethnographic communication, and the hope and challenges that such personalized accounts of “experience” make possible for conversational partners.

Contestation and Opportunity in Reflexivity: An Introduction:

Academic discourse on ideas and techniques of reflexivity in ethnographic research are common and essential. Less common are collections devoted entirely to this topic, and those conducted by diverse researchers who draw on distinctive intellectual values and commitments for cultural inquiry. Also strange to the literature are discussions about ethnographic reflexivity that are grounded in everyday personal and professional experiences of ethnographers, those lived but less-examined (and often contested) realities that constitute what it means to be ethnographers and do ethnography. This introduction briefly discusses this void in the literature and previews the current issue of Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies.

Cultural Studies and the Politics of Representation: Experience ↔ Subjectivity ↔ Research

This essay examines Joan W. Scott’s (1991) essay “The Evidence of Experience” in light of cultural studies scholarship that uses personal, experiential evidence, and/or innovative/critical methodologies. The authors argue that the situated, (inter)subjective, and complex nature of this inquiry conscientiously has brought to life Scott’s call for historicizing experience, rather than blindly using it as foundational, and enthusiastically continues doing so to date. In this way, these critical methods already seek to problematize and complicate experience, even as it is used to talk toward and/ or against cultural norms.

Lost in Narration: Applying Autoethnography

The authors convey a story of getting lost in narration, on an applied and collaborative research project in which they combined autoethnography (AE), mindfulness, and relational communication. They examine common criticisms of AE in an effort to more accurately narrate how the method operates communicatively and resonates with commitments of applied communication research. This tale ends with a few invitational morals that are directed to skeptics and practitioners of AE.

Reflecting on the Call to Ethnographic Reflexivity: A Collage of Responses to Questions of Contestation

Key themes that motivated this special issue on ethnographic reflexivity are discussed in the following section. Specifically, contributors responded to all or some of the shared questions posed by issue editors. Contributors offered an array of open thoughts and feelings concerning experiences and issues germane to reflexivity. As a dynamic and complex collage of discoveries and possibilities, contributors sought to perpetuate open and frank discussions, as well as future research, concerning the contested nature of ethnographic reflexivity.

Reconciling the Relational Echoes of Addiction Holding On

This article explores the negotiation of a father–son relationship in the context of addiction, as conveyed from the vantage point of the relationship the author maintains with his father. The author conveys narrative fragments to explore a range of facets of the relationship and to illustrate how relationships of this kind often resist easy answers. Indeed, they are multifaceted interactional processes confounded by the powerful grip of history and emotion. In seeking a clearer understanding of the complexities of the father–son relationship within addiction, the author aims for a fuller understanding of the difficulties that motivate and complicate his own recovery.

Introduction Queering Family, Home, Love, Loss/Relational Troubling

There is an unmistakable power in narrative to comment on and shape cultural lives. This special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies is comprised of often unheard stories that seek to queer the relational phenomena of family, home, love, and loss. Authors draw on a range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies to disrupt and dismantle the normative conceptualizations that pervade research and everyday understanding concerning these thematic areas. These essays work in creative and experimental ways to evocatively demonstrate Queer Theory and queer as unique, needed, and generative paradigmatic orientations and conceptual tools for use in Cultural Studies research. They help to advance a more open and tentative understanding of relational stories and fluid and dynamic relational identities.There is an unmistakable power in narrative to comment on and shape cultural lives. This special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies is comprised of often unheard stories that seek to queer the relational phenomena of family, home, love, and loss. Authors draw on a range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies to disrupt and dismantle the normative conceptualizations that pervade research and everyday understanding concerning these thematic areas. These essays work in creative and experimental ways to evocatively demonstrate Queer Theory and queer as unique, needed, and generative paradigmatic orientations and conceptual tools for use in Cultural Studies research. They help to advance a more open and tentative understanding of relational stories and fluid and dynamic relational identities.

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.