Tony E. Adams

A Review of Narrative Ethics

If we use stories as “equipment for living,” as tools to understand, negotiate, and make sense of situations we encounter, then a discussion of narrative ethics is a relevant, if not required, endeavor. In other words, if we learn how to think, feel, and interact with society via narratives, we also learn ethical ways of being with others, “correct” and “appropriate” ways that serve as foundations for many of our interactions. This latter epistemological assumption guides this study. In this article, the author synthesizes ethical themes of life research, themes of narrative privilege, media, and evaluative criteria. He then illustrates how these themes influence narrative inquiry.

Telling Stories: Reflexivity, Queer Theory, and Autoethnography:

This essay focuses on intersections of reflexivity as both an orientation to research and a writing practice that brings together the method of autoethnography and the paradigm of queer theory. Taking seriously autoethnography’s and queer theory’s commitments to uncertain, fluid, and becoming subjectivities, multiple forms of knowledge and representations, and research as an agent of change, we write a series of reflexively queer personal texts. These texts ask us—as writers and readers in a community of scholars—to question our desire to name and claim stories and to embrace the gifts and challenges of open texts and the importance of reflexivity as we test the limits of knowledge and certainty.

Seeking Father Relationally Reframing a Troubled Love Story

Tension plagues the relationship between the author and his father when it comes to golf- and gay-related issues. The author is also stuck between two canonical stories, one that says he must work things out to fulfill his responsibilities as a son and another that tells him to let go, to realize that he “can’t choose his relatives,” and to view the relationship as a waste of time. In this project, the author uses a relational paradigm to reframe the father-son relationship in which he finds himself immersed. He’s a victim, so is his father. He’s an oppressor, so is his father. They victimize and oppress together, simultaneously hurting and being hurt while never deciding to quit. The story is about the troubled relationship that separates them. It’s a story of sexuality and sport, of gayness and hegemonic masculinity, of a fag and his golf clubs. It’s a story of love and hate.

Missing Each Other

In “Seeking Father” (Adams, 2006), I used a relational perspective to understand the relationship I have with my father—a perspective that conceived of our relationship as a co-constitutive endeavor in which we each affected the other, and a perspective that showed how our conflict emerged as a product of joint interaction, of us being, working, and relating—together. In this project, I continue a similar trajectory. I use a relational perspective to describe moments when my father and I miss each other—moments when I long for him and when I perceive him to long for me, moments when we fail to connect, moments when we hurt and are hurt by each other but neither one of us ever deciding to quit, moments in which we practice stifling communicative patterns and moments in which we both seek love. May be we’re both in love, somehow.

Introduction: On (Writing) Fathers

In this article, the authors provide a context for, and an introduction to, the contributions in this special issue on sons and fathers. After alluding to the rich heritage of literature on sons and fathers, the authors propose three themes that run through this collection: the continuing significance of son-father relationships, the act of writing such relationships into being, and the “clunky intimacy” conveyed. They follow this with an outline of the lines of inquiry contained within each of the subsequent articles, and conclude by drawing attention to the absences left within and by this issue.In this article, the authors provide a context for, and an introduction to, the contributions in this special issue on sons and fathers. After alluding to the rich heritage of literature on sons an...

Mothers, Faggots, and Witnessing (Un)Contestable Experience

In this essay, I make two suggestions about personal experience represented in writing. First, I suggest that this experience can be contested when the conditions and the representation of experience are critiqued rather than the experience itself. Second, I suggest that personal experience represented in writing, for example, an autoethnography, can also be “uncontestable” (Scott, 1991, p. 777). An autoethnography is not a disembodied text. A body, a subject, a vulnerable body and subject, is intertwined with and constituted by this text. As such, it becomes difficult to disentangle an autoethnographic representation from its corresponding, constituted-via-this-representation body and subject, thus making a critique of the text a critique of the life.

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.

Size Matters: Performing (Il)Logical Male Bodies on FatClub.com

Situated against a pervasive and normative logic suggesting that bodies, and especially thin-and-fit bodies, matter most and ought to be attained, FatClub.com provokes a counterintuitive cultural scene. This virtual ethnography examines how members of the site jointly constitute community through an elaborate system of linguistic and embodied proweight cultural performances. In turn, these performances ecstatically cite, disidentify, and play with normative (gay male) health and beauty ideals. Moreover, they provide an exquisite instantiation of how culture and community are constraining, situated, and relative phenomena.

Capuzza, Jamie C., and Leland G. Spencer, eds. Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories

In 2009, I contacted an editor of one of the National Communication Association’s sanctioned journals to inquire about doing a literature review on transgender identities and experiences—a review that would also justify the need for acknowledging these identities and experiences in communication research. However, in e-mail after e-mail, I found myself being asked to define what transgender was, describe characteristics of persons who identify as transgender, and make a case for why transgender identities and experiences were important for communication research. Eventually, the editor said that there weren’t enough of “them” to justify such a review. I do not expect all communication scholars to study transgender populations or experiences, but I do expect scholars to recognize that transgender identities and experiences exist. More specifically, I find it ethically imperative for scholars who study sex, gender, and communication to, at the very least, acknowledge the experiences of persons who identify as transgender. As you might sense, I experienced immense joy when I learned about Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories, an edited collection that is indeed “the first of its kind in the communication discipline” (ix). This collection offers a focused and sincere attempt to understand and advocate on behalf of transgender identities and experiences. Throughout, contributors interrogate the meanings and experiences of transgender identities in relation to key communication contexts (e.g., interpersonal, health, organizational, media, rhetorical) and topics (e.g., self-disclosure, intimacy, social media, workplace protections); show how discourse (e.g., religious, legal) about persons who identify as transgender can have “real, material effects” on their lives (196); illustrate the ways in which representations assign motives, establish constraints for, and can be used against persons who identify as transgender; and describe various (mis)uses of language, the successes and problems of (in)visibility and (un)intelligibility, and how transgender bodies can serve as sites of variation and contestation. This collection will no longer allow communication scholars and journal editors to easily avoid these topics. I want to highlight three key features of the collection. First, many of the contributors dissect the relationship between sexual orientation and gender identity. For example, Norwood and Lannutti (Chapter 4) describe how some families considered transgender identity to be more stigmatized than lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) identities, and explore how transgender identities were “perceived to be less concealable due to readily observable transition changes” (66). Booth (Chapter 7) articulates a dialectic of self/other identification by illustrating how documentaries about transgender experiences privilege surgical reassignment as the primary evidence of a legitimate transgender identity, as well as considering instances when others dismiss the gendered pronouns transgender persons use to describe themselves. And Barnett (Chapter 10) describes how Joshua Riverdale posts photos on the blog Gender Outlaw to offer a “continuous visual archive

Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India's Partition

In Home, Uprooted, Devika Chawla combines personal/familial experiences with oral histories from refugees of the India–Pakistan Partition to offer compelling accounts of how people perform “home” a...