Tami Spry

Tattoo stories: A postscript to skins

This essay and accompanying script describe the authors search for a mode of scholarship suitable for the expression of passion and spirit within the communal narrative of academe.

Call it Swing: A Jazz Blues Autoethnography

This performative autoethnography utilizes jazz swing as a method to further activate the critical processes in qualitative research. In reflecting on my father’s 25 years as a jazz musician, I find his everyday lived methodology of swing provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which family inheritance collides with sociocultural practices of racial inequity and cultural appropriation. Autoethnographically re/inhabiting this space and sound with my father revealed a performative ethos, an empathetic epistemology of critical reflection activated by the transgressive discipline of jazz. Specifically, this performative ethos is applied to issues of racial accountability, embodied theorizing, and the ethical implications of an aesthetic/epistemic praxis in autoethnography. More broadly, I offer performative ethos as critical pedagogy assisting in living a critical life where issues of power and privilege are personally political and are written and rewritten daily with others in hope of utopia.

Intensity: A Collaborative Autoethnography

In this collaborative autoethnography, the five of us explore the experience and ethics of writing—and living—from/in intensity. We have been writing together since meeting at the Third International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI), when we made a commitment to write over the following year to, for, and with each other. It became an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, exploring questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing, a series of texts exchanged via e-mail. This essays sequence of writing during July and August 2008 follows a period of silence. Senses of intensities emerged from our collaborative autoethnographic practice over this period: We remain unsure of what intensities might be, and in the fluidity of this lack of certainty we feel we can claim a pedagogical practice of inquiry that comes from this writing into our always not-yet-known.

The Accusing Body

This essay addresses and critiques attempts by politicians to legislate the language used to describe and therefore define women’s experience of sexual assault. What is written from the body changes the body and vice versa; what is performed turns back on itself changing word and body. Rep. Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta) wants to label me “accuser,” thereby erasing my assaulted body unless and until “there’s a conviction in the matter.” There was never a conviction in the matter of my case. So where does that leave me? He doesn’t want me to claim victimage, as if being a victim is somehow a privilege, a legal labeling granted on “proof” of the attack. The assaulted body is changed by the legal replacement of “victim” for “accuser.” The word tries to displace or erase the action from the agent and replace it with a burden of proof. So following a most heinous experience, as “accuser,” the woman must now carry the burden of proving herself, accounting not only for her own experience, but also, that it actually happened. Performative autoethnography offers a method of intervening upon legislated language assaults by speaking from the body with agency and ethical representation. The possibilities of deconstructing “accuser” and reconstructing research that offers a multiplicity of being in the body of assault offers argument to oppressive gender notions of violence. Performative autoethnography offers hope and efficacy in the doing.

Collaborative Writing in Real Time

In this article we record, recount, and reflect on a 48-hour period in which we hang out in a rented house beside a lake with the intention of writing collaboratively. The writing emerges out of conversations. Our exchanges move back and forth and sideways between talking, writing, reading, and responding to each other’s writing. These exchanges are held together and created through cooking, eating, going to the pub, walking, making cocktails, singing, and arguing. This is a narrative account, in real/chronological time of a collaborative process of generating this writing. As such these are the raw, unedited texts. Our process includes three instances of talking, writing, and reading. We offer this as a backstage snapshot of collaborative writing.

Possibilities and Positionalities

This is a gnarly question—our favorite kind. We would like to question the question, or at least one of its premises. Rather than addressing the limits posed (reflexively) by “Dame Rhetoric” and her “Outlaw Sister,” performance studies, we focus instead on the possibilities each holds for/with the other (and yes, we choose “dame” and “outlaw” for their historical significance and sometimes marginalized spaces within the academy). Our response to the discussion, then, is informed by a recent collaborative project and framed by the following perspective: rhetoric and performance studies converge in their insistence to engage the public realm critically, aesthetically, dialogically, and ethically. As a part of their respective traditions, rhetoric and performance studies reflect the Socratic pedagogical imperative of critical self-reflection. “The Socratic commitment to questioning” as Cornel West argues, “requires a relentless self-examination and critique of institutions of authority, motivated by an endless quest for intellectual integrity and moral consistency.... manifest in a fearless speech—parrhesia—that unsettles, unnerves, and unhouses people from their uncritical sleepwalking” (16 original emphasis). Martha C. Nussbaum echoes the Socratic quest, arguing that a liberal education should be about the “cultivation of humanity,” which involves three capacities: the “critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions,” living what Socrates called “the examined life”; the ability to see oneself as a human being “bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern”; and the development of one’s “narrative imagination”—the “ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of another person different from oneself, to be an intelligent

Unseating the Myth of a Girl and Her Horse, Now That’s True Grit

Like many other experiences that have the potentiality of empowerment for girls, the physical, intellectual, and emotional strength required in working with horses gets reduced to a facile anthropomorphized Disneyesque romance. In reality, it is a nuanced negotiation of muscle and sway. As a girl, Westerns offered me an empowering image of women and horses. This article seeks to track the complexity of some of those connections.

Beauties, Barmaids, and Ballbusters: How to Be a Woman in the (Old) West

This essay critically reflects upon a performative autoethnography presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2014; it also constitutes a continuation of a previous performative autoethnography presented at ICQI 2012, “Unseating the Myth of a Girl and Her Horse, Now Thats True Grit.” In writing and performing this essay through the method of the textualizing body, as well as critically reflecting upon it here and now post performance, I find the process of embodiment offered through performance pushes me into a different understanding about the complexities concerning the cultural problematics brought about by “beauties, barmaids, and ballbusters” of the (old) West. The performative-I process revealed a simultaneous rejection and recuperation of these stock characters, revealing a futurity of gender possibilities though utopian performatives.