Self,Relationship,Positionality,and Politics

Abstract

In 2009, Toyosaki, Pensoneau-Conway, Wendt, and Leathers developed a collaborative writing method called community autoethnography (CAE). Participants dialogically collaborate through writing in order to “resituate identified social/cultural and sensitive issues” with the explicit goals of community-building and “cultural and social intervention.” In this article, we use CAE to explore and interrogate the politics, ethics, and boundaries of our collaborations and relationships. As individuals entering this collaborative engagement, we occupy various positions in relation to each other—stranger, best friend, student-turned-colleague/friend, student-friend, sibling, and so on. Each of these positions is subsequently complicated by social positions and relational politics that necessarily inform the process of collaborative writing. We write vulnerabilities across boundaries and between relationships, and in the process, with careful purpose, we write the becoming of new relationships, the becoming of community.

Keywords

community autoethnography relational difference intersubjectivity identity

This issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies focuses on a growing practice (of critique) within critical scholarship—collaborative writing. The academy is often quick to engage in discussions of (inter)subjectivity, of the co-constructed nature of interpersonal relationships, and of the dialectical tensions in those relationships. However, the academy has long upheld the standard of sole and clear authorship (cf. Gale, Speedy, & Wyatt, 2010; Moreira & Diversi, 2012).

We value collaborative writing as a direct challenge to such a standard, and aim to textually and discursively engage this relational inquiry. In 2001, Ede and Lunsford noted that since the 1980s,

[they] have been calling on scholars . . . to enact contemporary critiques of the author and of the autonomous individual through a greater interest in and adoption of collaborative writing practices—and to do so not only in classrooms but in scholarly and professional work as well. (pp. 355-356)

We are heartened not only by this special issue, but by the many contemporary scholars who are taking up collaborative writing, shaping it in different ways across space and time. What we find most exciting is that collaborative writing, in these senses, is more than just co-authored scholarship. Bochner and Ellis (1995) developed narrative co-construction in an effort to highlight personal narrative as always situated within a relationship. On the page, this takes the form of a polyvocal, yet singular, narrative. Toyosaki and Pensoneau (2005) extended the use of narrative co-construction, and write the process onto the page, drawing upon the visual aesthetic of two competing narratives of the “same” event, side-by-side, chronologically. What the reader sees begins as two stories, each in its own column, merging into one. Wyatt, Gale, Gannon, and Davies (2010) engaged a four-act play in which they wrestle with Deleuzian concepts such as flow and haecceity, even positioning direct quotations as constitutive of Deleuze as a fifth character. Wyatt, Gale, Russell, Pelias, and Spry (2011) authored into being their relationship as an intentional and intimate community of writers and collaborators, autoethnographers and friends. Shortly after, Gale and Pineau (2011) gifted us with their collaborative performative writing, using space on the page, font, and indentation to engage Deleuzian inquiry through imagery, metaphor, and poetry, culminating in a “conversational distillation” of a year’s worth of inspired correspondence over seas (p. 317). Alexander, Moreira, and kumar (2012) employed performative writing in a “triple autoethnographic text” of resistance narratives that, though each author’s narrative could stand alone, are woven together in dialogue with one another to provide a “narrative gestalt” of “the male child struggling with notions of biology as destiny” (p. 122). Shortly after, Gale, Martin, Sakellariadis, Speedy, and Spry (2012) provided a backstage glimpse at collaborative writing, paging unedited texts from a 48-hour period of writers living: “cooking, eating, going to the pub, walking, making cocktails, singing, and arguing” (p. 401). Adding to the collection of innovative narrative methods is collaborative autoethnography, detailed in Chang, Ngunjiri, and Hernandez’s (2013) Collaborative Autoethnography. Further demystifing the belief that autoethnography must always be a solo practice, the authors develop a method of collaboration that includes specific steps of data collection, analysis, and interpretation. They detail the process of collaboration in various forms, from a collection of narratives in response to a prompt, to a continual and back-and-forth process of revisions among several authors. In a beautiful portrait of a Holocaust survivor, Ellis and Rawicki (2013) introduced us to collaborative witnessing as a form of relational autoethnography. In a play on time, Rawicki narrates his experiences of being there, as he moves throughout the Polish ghettos of World War II, inviting Ellis and the reader into collaborative witnessing. Ellis intersperses these narratives with conversational excerpts, as Rawicki reflects to her on these memories.

In our collaborative writing endeavor, we utilize community autoethnography (CAE), a method first developed by Toyosaki, Pensoneau-Conway, Wendt, and Leathers (2009). In CAE, participants dialogically collaborate through writing in order to “resituate identified social/cultural and sensitive issues” with the explicit goals of community-building and “cultural and social intervention” (p. 59): community through collaboration. Collaborators be-come together to autoethnographically and/yet dialogically grapple with a particular (though broad) issue. (In their original piece, Toyosaki et al. engaged the issue of Whiteness and education. In more recent work, Pensoneau-Conway, Toyosaki, Tankei-Aminian, and Aminian-Tankei [in press], use CAE to engage intimate relationships across ethnic difference and privilege.) As (intersubjective) individuals entering into this collaborative engagement, we occupy various (and numerous) positions in relation to each other—stranger, best friend, student-turned-colleague/friend, student-friend, sibling, and so on. Intersubjectivity would understand the “self” to be a myth, as that “self” is necessarily relational. Schrag (1986) refers to this as the “implicated self” to connote that “self” implicates “other” and vice versa. In other words, “I” am not “I” without “you,” and “you” are not “you” without “me” (or, perhaps more appropriately, without “I”). Each of the positions we occupy in our relationships is subsequently complicated by social positions and relational politics that necessarily inform the process of collaborative writing. With careful purpose, we write together to “go beyond [this] array of previous relationships” (Gergen & Gergen, 2002, p. 12), re-birthing those relationships.

* * *

What are you to me? What relationship do I frontload, and when?

Best friend or housemate or colleague?

Sister or writing partner or friend?

Student or friend or co-author?

With each centering comes a decentering. With each decentering comes a momentary loss of relationship. How do we honor the simultaneity of our relational roles, the intersections of our relationships? Never just my sister; never just my writing partner; never just my friend. But also always more than just the sum of the relationships: sister + writing partner + friend ≠ our relationship. Instead, the dynamics of bodies interacting and relating in and away from the borderlands of their intersections—informing, denying, contrasting, affirming, and ultimately, becoming relationship.

* * *

In this intersubjective process, back and forth writers write; one writer shares a narrative with the group, and any other writer who senses a theoretical, conceptual, performative, and/or experiential connection writes and shares that connection through another narrative. Our writing community began in the Fall of 2000, when Satoshi and Sandy found themselves in the same graduate program. Fast friends, we were, quickly investing in both a personal and professional collaboration. Upon leaving our graduate program and moving into our respective faculty positions, we naturally entered the roles of advisor to a variety of graduate students, Derek and Kyle being two of those students. Erin’s background in communication studies, and sibling relationship with Derek, made for generative conversations. The writing community forged in this project was birthed across difference, across our mutual interest in engaging automethodological research, and across our mutual affinity for one another as relational partners and scholars. After we established our group, Sandy created a Google document, shared it with the group, and wrote the first narrative. For nearly five months, everyone was able to access the document anytime. Although separated by physical space, technology via a Google doc meant that collaborative writing could happen in virtual real-time. As someone was writing, others could be simultaneously reading the writing as it happened, or two people could be writing on the same document at the same time, electronically. However, with the exception of the exchange between Derek and Sandy, we were not intentionally online at the same time. Rather than planning writing meetings, or having an order in which to respond, or asking that everyone respond to everyone else, we wanted the process to take shape on its own in a more organic way. This allowed for more in-the-moment writing and reading, a more raw engagement with the text, and for the writing to be the conversation about the writing. In perhaps what might be understood as a selfish technique, we felt that our choice of method helped us to avoid the pressure, the weight, of a pre-determined process that Pelias experienced as a member of a writing community (Gale, Pelias, Russell, Spry, & Wyatt, 2012). We let our narratives tell us when enough was enough, and then began the process of editing. As a writing community, we looked for themes our narratives brought forth. We highlighted theoretical connections; we let our narratives travel to other locations within the narrative string. We asked our narratives to speak to one another, and subsequently, arranged them to facilitate that dialogue.

As a reader of this article, you may notice differences in narrative style. Some are written with a sense of singularity, connecting to other narratives but seemingly single-authored. Other narratives have more of a conversational feel. Examples here include the narrative turns between Satoshi and Kyle, and the exchange between Derek and Erin—this portion was written together in Derek’s living room during a coincidental visit. What remains important to us, and to our spirit of collaboration here and now, is that as narratives were written, other collaborators were moved to write narrative responses. While the narratives may not explicitly and directly connect with the previous or subsequent narrative in the dialogue, they nonetheless provide a sort of narrative gestalt. Both on and off the page, throughout the process of collaborative living, narratives move around, finding each other in curious and unexpected ways. The community autoethnographer performs the roles of both writer and audience. In this way, space absent a textual contribution does not signify passive, inactive witnessing. Instead, it marks a dialogic role of listener/audience and (inter)active witness, also calling into question both the temporality (how do we determine the beginning and/or ending of a narrative/experience?) and ownership (who owns an experience?) of a narrative. Finally, sections below that do not denote authorship were collaborative constructs assembled by varying authors. They have intentionally been left unmarked with names in the hope you will focus on self and relationship becoming in the narrative sections, rather than focus on explicit authorship.

Sandy

I thought it might be coming soon, bringing both dread and excitement. I loved seeing Derek’s evolution as a student, writer, and critical autoethnographer. I had come to admire his ability to play with and through words. Derek’s writing beckoned me. The old cliché “the student should surpass the teacher” came to pass. Proud of my advisee!

(jealous of his writerly self)

I knew it was coming, the offer to write together. I’ve lived for a long time with the imposter syndrome, the constant worry that I’ll be found out, that people will come to know that I don’t really belong in academia. Satoshi’s friendship, partnership, and collegiality surround me with comfort and assurance, a prized belongingness. I value the “us.” What if I had another writing partner? Would I be committing academic adultery? How would I tell Satoshi that I was writing with someone else? Furthermore, a confident familiarity undergirds my writing relationship with Satoshi that doesn’t undergird my relationship with Derek. Satoshi’s evocative writing equally beckons me. Our history provides safety; Derek’s provides vulnerability. Satoshi knows me and my work style. We work, together. What if Derek finds out I’m an imposter? What if Derek finds out that his teacher, his advisor, who he has nominated for multiple teaching and advising awards, doesn’t belong here? “Once I finish this dissertation, we should write something together.” “Yeah,” I hedge. “That would be great.”

Satoshi

Collaborative writing is difficult, time-consuming, steals my energy. This writing I believe in does not create conventional productivity and speedy results, the kind that easily bring tenure. I have certainly asked myself, “Why do I do this?” The why—my axiological commitment to this type of research—remains important.

In my doctoral program, I started writing with Sandy out of curiosity (toward the method) and convenience (we lived together). We shared both coursework and paradigmatic perspectives. As a non-native English speaker, Sandy’s writing amazed me. Our collaboration demonstrated how my word choices, expressions, sentences, paragraphs, and arguments were read, negotiated, and interpreted by a reader, my writing partner. Our collaboration embodies and affirms how such writing practices create and inform important relationships. As a communication scholar, I must examine my axiological commitment toward researching human relationships, be they teacher-student, colleagues, friends, romantic partners, writer-reader, a writer-writer, and so on. Relationships are hopeful sites of scholarship, scholarship that critiques and transforms social processes of power, injustice, and oppression. Collaborative labor births joy. Is Sandy committing adultery? With a little chuckle, I respond, “No.” Sandy’s vulnerability with Derek and security with me are both relational locales within which we collaboratively mount our labor. We need a type of research that helps us write a relationship—to call a relationship forth into being—as a vehicle, mode, and site, all simultaneously, of critical collaborative labor.

Kyle

I notice the books on the shelves of Satoshi’s office as he pores over my writing for class, making notations, striking through words (sometimes whole sentences). Finished, he remarks, “This is good, but let’s go over what I have written together.” I look at the paper. It doesn’t look good. The corrections bleed blue ink. An hour later, halfway done, he has to leave. Exasperated, I sigh and lament, “I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong!” He looks at me and offers, “Your writing is not wrong. Everyone can work at writing. What you need to ask yourself is, ‘Who am I writing for?’” . . .

Satoshi

It is about you and your reader, and the relationship built between.

Kyle

. . . My undergraduate self wrote comfortably, wrote for me, wrote for the “A.” As the “A”s piled up on my transcripts, I figured that my writing required little, or no, improvement. I wrote the way that I wrote. I never considered a different way to think about writing . . .

Satoshi

Listen to write and write to listen.

Kyle

. . . And so it continued in graduate school, but instead of “A”s and “B”s, it was publications and conference papers. The topics changed from “Compare and Contrast” to “Autoethnographic Inquiries Into the Critical-Performative Aspects of Politeness Rituals,” but the ethic was the same. My graduate self wrote comfortably, wrote for me . . .

Satoshi

Writing presupposes a person to write for and to listen to.

Kyle

. . . Who am I writing for? I want to start writing for others. But who is the Other? Is the Other a generalized audience, an undifferentiated mass that waits for enlightenment from our scholarly words of wisdom? Is the Other the highly specialized elite who live at the abstract heights of the ivory tower? What if I wanted to write for my mother, could I do that? Would you read that? . . .

Satoshi

Writing that invites someone to collaborate with me, invitational writing, is a difficult practice to theorize.

Kyle

Maybe writing for the Other could mean writing to be with the Other, to create a space where we come together to labor for meaning. It seems tricky, this writing, because there are no guarantees, no certainty that I get to say what I want to say. But maybe that is what Satoshi is trying to teach me: it is not about me.

Satoshi

Maybe it is both, Kyle.

Kyle

I realize my responsibility to work the hyphen (Fine, 1998), to interrogate the space of the Self-Other who are “knottily entangled” (p. 72). If I try to write solely for the Other, then I am eliding my responsibility to work at the hyphen.

On Writing

Pollock (1998) values performative writing for the ways it constitutes “the dynamic engagement of a contingent and contiguous (rather than continuous) relation between the writer and his/her subject(s), subject-selves, and/or reader(s)” (p. 86). Such writing “tends to subject the reader to the writer’s reflexivity,” creating what she terms a “critical ‘intimacy’” (p. 86). The relationship among five vectors—(a) the reader/audience, (b) the writer/author, (c) the act of reading/audiencing, (d) the act of writing/authoring, and (e) the text—cannot be deemphasized in collaborative writing. The vectors intersect, culminating in the relationship, and are nearly indistinguishable in both force and magnitude. At any moment, any one or more vectors could be at play to varying degrees. Within many moments, all are at play. Even (and often?) without thought, taking up the position of writer necessarily directs oneself toward a reader through the act of writing. One can be one’s own reader; the act of reading can also be the act of writing; the text is inseparable from the assemblage of reader/reading and writer/writing. The critical intimacy established in this process infuses a sense of response-ability among participants in collaborative writing. In CAE, we initially write for the immediate audience of one another (and ourselves), reflexively recognizing that our writing is constitutive of one another and our relationships.

Sandy

The course is Pedagogy and Dialogue. Always at the end of the conference table, I can count on Kyle’s additive presence, ever the ideal student. Ours has been an interesting history. We first met at a conference some years ago—which one I can’t remember, one of those, “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen you around” sort of deals, a relationship via mutual association with Satoshi. And now here he sits, at the end of the conference table, ever the ideal student. He affirms my contributions, as well as the contributions of our classmates. He extends our discussions by providing additional resources and contextualizing our notions of dialogue into other areas of study. What I don’t tell Kyle is that I am respectfully intimidated by and rely upon his expertise. Our teacher-student hyphen doesn’t allow this sort of conversation. Our friend-friend hyphen does, though, allow for my sarcasm. He remarks that something we read for class reminded him of a particular philosopher, and I sarcastically say, “Oh, of course I was thinking the same thing.” Kyle—and our classmates—laugh.

(I immediately regret it.)

Regardless of our hyphen’s history, I worry that I silence Kyle with my sarcasm. When is Kyle student? When is Kyle friend? I apologize to him after class, and of course he takes it in stride, brushing my comment off of his shoulder as though it was nothing. Still, this is a moment that will live with me for a long time. I am much more careful with my in-class relationships now, particularly with those folks with whom I also share an out-of-class relationship. Regretfully, this carefulness has come at Kyle’s expense.

Confessional: “Did you know that you matter to me in this way?”

I don’t know that I would have ever said to Kyle, “Remember that time in 531? No? I’m still sorry about it, and I’ve learned from my mistakes. Thank you for teaching me.” Collaborative writing provides us with the unique gift of making our relationships visible, of rendering available those moments of impact brought on by relationships we may have never even known we had, of creating critical intimacy in a context of care. Our collaborative writing engenders moments of relational theorization, and asks us to see the ways our hyphens butt up against one another, the ways those hyphens are both “contingent and contiguous” (Pollock, 1998, p. 86). Our collaboration challenges us to push the hyphens of student-teacher, friend-friend, sister-brother, laying our indistinguishable hyphens on top of one another. And yet we have the unique opportunity to witness moments of rupture, when we feel compelled to the confessional of identity in-the-making, of calling into visibility the moment of writing the self in ways we may not have been able to before.

Confessional: “I’m sorry, Kyle.”

Erin

As I hang up the phone with Derek after discussing the details of this article, I’m excited about the opportunity to collaborate with other autoethnographers, scholars who have had plenty of experience . . . and then I feel a bit terrified.

What have I gotten myself into this time?

What if my writing isn’t good enough?

What if people think I’m only collaborating because Derek is my brother? I pull my computer onto my lap. I look back through past conference papers to steady my mind and remind myself of my writing capabilities. I come to a paper I presented last year.

* * *

The classroom seems packed. I present last. I’m nervous. I’ve written about the domestic violence I experienced with my ex-husband before, but never with this much detail. The other presenters finish and I gather my paper. My brothers and some of our friends are part of the audience. Midway through my reading, at the peak of a violent interaction, I glance up and lock eyes on an unexpected face—Sandy’s. Tears well in her eyes.

Sorrow? Pity? Sympathy?

I really only know Sandy through Derek and limited conversations. But this connection is visceral. It’s like she feels my life living with domestic violence, feels what I feel. Although she is crying, Sandy’s apparent empathy offers me comfort. I master my emotions and continue on the strength that Sandy, whether she knows it or not, has given me.

* * *

This moment is a collaborative writing of relationship, of writing one’s life into being.

* * *

Who do I write for? Do I write for myself, for others with similar experiences, for the general community to elicit thinking (cf. Tamas, 2011) about experiences like mine? I appreciate writing with and for the Other. Sandy has now othered this story. From here on, will our relationship always be collaborating toward, away from, and/or out of it? Will all future collaborations come back to this initial collaboration? Have I authored myself survivor, advocate, friend? Have I authored Sandy counselor, friend, acquaintance? Collaborative writing does not end or begin with the black and white on the written page. I can’t take back sharing vulnerable, intimate details of my former married life. Nor would I. The bonus? That feeling of connection, comfort, and collaboration can’t be taken back either. That moment, in this relationship, makes it worthwhile.

Mètissage

Zuss (1999) evokes the notion of mètissage to describe “the braided weave of multiple and composite identities that may intentionally be drawn from experience in acts of self-authorization” (p. 87). Oftentimes used in the context of exiled identities—diasporic peoples, colonized populations, hybrid bodies—Zuss employs mètissage to gesture toward a particular framework for what he calls life-writings. Life-writings write one’s life into being. “Literary mètissage is a form of representation and rhetorical practice that works through the fabrics of differences immanent in language and identity” (p. 88). Mètissage grows in collaborative life-writing practices such as CAE. Collaborative writing makes possible the phenomenological bracketing of life events in such a way that those events aren’t rendered fixed, determined, or solitary, nor are they understood to belong to one particular person. Rather, this bracketing draws upon the ways mètissage champions a multiplicity of an ontologically relational and elusive self. Bracketing through our collaborative writing in this CAE as mètissage makes “for the existential possibilities of strategic, dialogic hybrids in acts of authoring and writing selves” (Zuss, 1999, p. 89). In our collaborative writing context, mètissage functions to breathe into the authoring process that elusive quality. Mètissage situates the (multivocal) self as the hyphen of the Self-Other, or student-teacher, or brother-sister, or colleague-friend-writing partner relationships we write into being.

Derek

I wake up on a mattress floating among a lake of unpacked boxes. The contents had been haphazardly sifted through to find what would come to be forgotten as the outfits for my first week as a bona fide assistant professor. After scanning the waves of unfolded Michigan-sweaters (inappropriate for Texas-teaching), I reach for my phone. I check my email like a dutiful teacher—junk, junk, junk, and a call for papers for a special issue on collaborative writing as inquiry. This shakes me awake, my mind a flurry with possibilities. Having written collaboratively with colleagues, friends, family, and my partner, I ponder the relationships that have begun, grown, suffered, and become through my collaborative writing endeavors. I have to write myself into this conversation, but with whom?

* * *

I take a break from writing and call Erin, my sister. “Hello?”

“Hey, what are you doing?” I ask.

“Nothing, just getting ready for bed.”

“I am working on the collaborative writing paper. I have something, but it has nothing to do with collaborative writing. Do you want to hear it?” Before she can answer, “Good, because I want to read it to you.”

She laughs, “Sure.”

* * *

I suffer from academic body image issues. Years ago, as a masters student, I picked up a sample issue of Text and Performance Quarterly at a conference. Skimming it, I stopped to read Drew’s (2006) argument that the academic sloth is co-created in dichotomous opposition with/to the academic rate-buster. Its effects were not unlike those of my monthly issue of Details magazine’s pictures of men with bodies unlike my own.

Sandy was my doctoral advisor. Not only has she inspired and challenged me through her teaching and writing, she supported me as I succeeded and failed. Before I created intellectual spaces for my own scholarship in queer theory, relational communication, and autoethnographic inquiry, Sandy carved space for me to become the person who could do that. In the beginning, I wanted to make Sandy proud of me—to do good work in her eyes. At some point, she taught me how to be proud of myself—how to do good work in my eyes. This, in my estimation, is one of the most difficult lessons to teach. I think it likely that I’ll always combat academic body image issues, but what Sandy’s teachings continue to impart upon me is perspective—I can do good work that matters to/for me, others, and society.

Every now and then someone asks me about my academic heroes. I genuflect, naming people like Michael Warner and Judith Butler. My head stops my heart, like when I stopped hugging my dad because it wasn’t cool, from saying that it’s Sandy. Her influence, immeasurable—her hero status, tried and true. That’s who I want to write with.

* * *

“What do you think? Do you see what I mean? I am just not able to write about collaboration or collaborative writing right now,” I rush.

“And how do you see what you just read to me as not being about collaborative writing?” she asks, contemplatively.

I take pause, finally, “Oh.”

Sandy

I brace myself to hear Erin’s performative reading. I know what’s coming. My contact with Erin has been limited at best. Derek links Erin and me, until this moment in the classroom-turned-conference room-turned-performance space. I know what’s coming, and so I strategically distance myself from Derek as I choose my seat. I’ve read her piece, I’ve witnessed Derek’s sense-making of his sister’s intimate relationship. Before she married, he and I conversed about the politics of name changing. Derek squirmed, uneasy with the sense of ownership Erin’s then-soon-to-be-husband might feel toward her were she to change her surname. More than once he reiterates the general sense of unease his impending in-law engenders. His instincts bring to life a brotherly protectiveness. I know what’s coming as Erin begins her story of all of the red flags that should have been. As she narrates the moments of physical and psychological abuse, I realize that she’s not telling someone else’s story. She’s living her story. It’s the story of the person standing right in front of me, and at the same time, is one that is shared by so many other people in the context of intimate partner violence. Her telling is personal; I bear witness.

I remember that I, too, have a brother, one who has so often provided a welcomed, loving, protective gesture.

I remember that Erin’s brother is sitting a few rows over from me, and that I consider Derek to be an intimate friendship partner. Our mutual intimacy with Derek is critical. Her powerful words, the ruptured tones of voice, the boom of the pounding on the desk/his fist on the apartment wall too-close-to,-yet-not-touching her face, the resolve that radiates from inside her, all beget tears in my eyes. I want to look at you, Derek. I want to see you audience this. I know this is the first time you have heard her speak/breathe these words aloud,

and I position you as my access to my brother,

and my access to Erin’s family, and my access to the intersubjective relationships that I have with you and with Erin and with those who have experienced abuse. I’m afraid to look at you, and I’m afraid to look at Erin. But I look at you anyway; my tears follow yours. I look at Erin, through my tears, and in that moment, you no longer mediate my relationship with her. Erin, I hope that my tears say to you,

“I hear you.”

Satoshi

“How do I hear you?”

The hearing that takes place in the conference room among Erin, Sandy, and Derek is a special kind of hearing that writes and invites reading of the writing, either on or off the page. Their embodied vulnerability writes. Their embodied attention reads. Their relationships labor collaboratively to understand the impact of domestic violence. They acknowledge and recognize each other’s presence in their lives, validating their intertextually woven relationships. A methodology where each other’s embodied vulnerability writes and embodied attention reads is collaborative writing I would like to endorse as “research.”

“What is this?”

I still remember sitting in the conference room taking Dr. Ron Pelias’ seminar on autoethnography. I used to be a statistical analyst of interpersonal communication, operationalizing, counting, and predicting human behaviors. (I still respect and enjoy reading this type of research, but I have come to understand that it’s not for me.) I wrote my seminar paper

alone

at home

a lonely process.

After meeting/reading Drs. Bochner and Ellis (1995), Sandy and I started writing together, describing, analyzing, interpreting, theorizing, and critiquing the cultural and social of her narrative self, my narrative self, our narrative relationship, and the culturally situated narrativity of our experiences. For a decade since we sat next to each other in Ron’s seminar, we have been doing this work. Used our vulnerability to make our lives textually available to each other. Used our attention to consume the text. Over and over, I have witnessed Sandy read my narratives and respond in written dialogue. I hope she has witnessed that I read her narratives and respond in dialogical kind.

The treasure is in the witnessing. The precious gift of collaborative writing is the never-ending, intertextual relationship that writers nurture and nourish. The weight of this precious gift—self-reflexive critique and accountability

sometimes

crushes

me.

The caring and supportive nature of this precious gift always encourages me. I can count on the friendship Sandy and I have developed through our collaborative writing as a vehicle, mode, and site of our critical collaborative labor, both as relationship partners and communication scholars.

Derek and Erin

Derek:

Once, after we finished presenting a collaborative piece about family autoethnography (writing about family with family), someone asked us how to get started writing with a sibling—asked us how we come to a piece, how we do it? We proffered a response, but I don’t think we approached an answer.

Erin:

We just do it. I thought to myself, “How would I not be able to do it?” I contemplated, how do we write together? How do we come to write about what we write about? These collaborations seemed to have always come so easily for us. In that question, I realized that we were taking some things for granted.

Derek:

Easily, yes, but not easy. Writing about our relationship allows us to spend time together in life and on the page. Sometimes time passing a laptop back and forth (like now), sometimes emailing, sometimes just talking. You’re right that something is being taken for granted. We have a good relationship, the ability to write as a result of having access to education, privilege associated with our upbringing, and then on top of all of that, so many shared experiences. And then there are the experiences that aren’t shared but become shared or witnessed through our writing together. These intersections into your life, like your experiences with domestic violence, are places where I feel my absence. They’re places that I couldn’t be with you. Collaborative writing lets me in.

Erin:

We still don’t have an answer, though. I’ve heard you tell the story of your Las Vegas strip club (mis)adventure many times. It was all jokes and laughter then. It wasn’t until I read your narrative that I could feel your frustration and pain, the ubiquitous heteronormativity that you negotiate, heightened in Las Vegas. When I read the story told reflexively, your writing and my reading granted me access. I have an answer: we start by writing not what makes our family, but rather, what is excluded from our family.

Derek:

If I had a chance to answer again, consider this: Write about that which family ties bind, but also write about that which is bigger than the ties. Write about what your family relationship mediates, mitigates, and maybe most of all, the un(shared)experiences that your family relationship regulates.

Erin:

I like that. Un(shared)experiences meaning what you don’t (and maybe couldn’t) experience and/or share with/because family. Write your apart selves together, together.

Sandy

In one of our first courses together as graduate students, Satoshi asked me to proofread one of his class papers. Of course I obliged. Not only did it give me a chance to read his writing, but if I could be of service, I wanted to be. Our graduate education put us in close contact with one another to the point where we began to want to be in close contact with one another. As I engaged with scholars who wrote about Whiteness, White privilege, the politics of race and nationality and language, I couldn’t help but to place our relationship into this important scholarship. I developed a different understanding of what it meant for me—a White woman with intersecting privileges—to “proofread” the paper of an academically excellent yet marginalized Japanese international student. More importantly, he was my friend.

We drive in the car one day; I’m not sure what we’re talking about. I comment, “I like to help you. I don’t mind at all!” not yet understanding the politics of (imposed?) service around which our relationship has been built.

We often sit in the Barnes and Noble café, discussing and moving through our readings for our grad courses. We talk about our projects, upcoming conferences, personal frustrations, enjoying becoming important parts of one another’s lives on multiple levels. An older woman walks by us and asks me, “Oh, are you teaching him English?” In awkwardness and discomfort, I reply a simple “no.”

Eventually, we decide to become housemates. Satoshi asks that I be the one to call our potential rental managers, worried that when they hear him speak, they will not want to rent to us.

The phenomenon of proofreading—of my proofreading his work—becomes extraordinary. It is much, much more than just dotting an “i” and crossing a “t” every now and then. Thurlow (2010) articulates difference as constitutive of identity, and reasons that we are able to make sense of our identity in the ways that we understand ourselves to be different from those around us. As an intersubjective system, language “unavoidably amplif[ies] and augment[s] the social voices with which we speak . . . ” (p. 229). This ushers in language as a hegemonic force, particularly when we insist upon the hegemonic Standard English used in the language of the academy. I grow to understand that my proofreading is hardly about clarity and readability. Rather, I begin to realize the ways I participate in the reproduction of this hegemonic language system through seemingly neutral “proofreading.” For what type of proof am I reading. What will my reading prove or disprove? I don’t just erase or change a word here or there. Do I erase and change Satoshi himself? Does my erasure of w rds and “., ? ! ” allow an erasure of his id nt ty, and so easily?

Both my writing and my interpersonal collaborations with Satoshi

indeed, Satoshi himself

have deepened my capacity for self-reflexivity, intercultural sensitivity, and critical selfhood (Toyosaki, 2012). Ours is a relationship founded upon difference in very visible and visceral ways. I feel fortunate that he has allowed me to learn from him not only through his written words, but through the ways that we write one another into being. In the process, we write our relationship into being. The projects we’ve collaborated on in publication form, and in our lives off the page, are some of my proudest moments.

Kyle

I am reading through articles and book chapters to start a final paper for a class. The syllabus states, “The final paper should be 20-30 pages (excluding references) and conference or publication ready.” Nervously, I wonder how I got to this point in my life. I don’t know if I can do this.

As I flip page after page, scribbling in the margins and underlining passages, I begin to notice a pattern among the scholarship:

single author

single single

single

When did writing become such a lonely practice? I look around Barnes and Noble, my usual writing haunt, and see . . . well, no one I know.

I’m alone.

Working on a paper for transformative pedagogy in higher education and

I am alone in a coffee shop.

Later in the week, I approach some other students about their writing. They too feel the pressure to be the lone researcher. Like Rosaldo’s (1989) Lone Ethnographer, we brave the sea of literature as our “rite of passage” (p. 14), coming back with tales of enduring sickness, sleepless nights, and (hopefully) impressive ideas.

But always alone.

We, the other students and I, decide to meet every Sunday. We pass our work around, letting others read it and offer advice. I love it. I love reading other people’s work; it’s all so great. Better than mine in fact. As I come to this realization, I stop giving my work to others. “Oh I don’t have anything,” I hedge, “but I’ll look over your manuscript!” After a few weeks one says, “Why don’t you ever have anything? All you do is help other people. Don’t you need help too?”

~~~And I am caught.~~~

I am caught in Freire’s (1970/2006) false generosity, charity that distorts human relationships rather than builds them. Caught in my attempt to always be the one who acts rather than the one who is acted upon. Caught trying to deny the hyphen.

Being-With

We value the hyphens we live in within our relationships with one another. In much of our work outside of this current project, we often draw upon Freirean pedagogy in which relationships are fundamental. A central tenet of such pedagogy is that human beings are unfinished. We are forever in a process of searching, of working toward that (unattainable) finished state. Paradoxically, if we continue to engage in our vocation of becoming more fully human, we will never be finished. It is important to note that our being—considered, perhaps, individually as Sandy, Derek, Satoshi, Kyle, Erin—is not only in, of, and for itself. We are beings of presence, of being present in relationships with others and with the world. We are a presence that can critically reflect upon its contextual self. Critical reflection, unfinishedness, and the process of searching are all essential ontological components to our being human. The awareness of our incomplete state is a condition for the possibility of relationships. Our being (as in being human, a human-being), is not simply being in the world; rather, it is a being-with (as Freire calls it, 1998) others in relationship, partners in our search for completeness.

As we reflect upon our collaborative writing through CAE, we are so visibly reminded that we build relationships with one another as humans-being-with. While geography separated us physically, technology (perhaps ironically, given its disembodiedness) allowed us to be writing/reading with a sort of always access (an access that even email couldn’t duplicate as immediately). Sandy and Erin’s relationship fundamentally changed in the seemingly singular moment of a tale’s telling, and tears falling. This resonated in the ways Sandy understood Derek not only as “student,” but also as her intimate friendship other and Erin’s intimate familial other. Thus, Sandy, Erin, and Derek could reflect upon the making and re-making of their being-with one another. Similarly, Derek and Erin theorized a family autoethnography of un(shared)experiences, endeavoring an articulation of being-with each other through writing apart selves together, together. For Derek and Erin, the hyphen of brother-sister delimits a familial relationship that denies access to certain experiences. They position their collaborative writing as a sort of relational recovery of what the hyphen denies. Kyle and Satoshi’s relationship took a different sort of shape as they worked together to examine notions of audience, of written by and written for. Satoshi emphasized that collaborative writing engenders an axiological commitment to the Other, dialoguing with Kyle about the notion of that Other. They understood collaborative writing as an embodiment of relational praxis. Fine’s (1998) elaboration of “working the hyphen” allowed Satoshi and Kyle to discover the hyphen as signifying us; we write for the us, not for you or for me or even for you and me. Erin theorized that she writes for Others she may not even know, but a commonality of experience is potentially found in the hyphen. Indeed, we write the hyphen into being through collaborative writing practices.

Derek and Sandy

Derek:

We should write something together. (send)

Sandy:

I’m stuck on the word “together.” What does it mean to write, together? (send)

Derek:

I’m not even sure what it means to not write together anymore. Can anyone really write alone? An intersubjective self, and a self being-with, would say “no.” Was I already writing with you when we were student-advisor? Even more so I wonder if I was writing about you when I wrote my relationships with relational others in co-constructed narrative. (send)

Sandy:

I still feel vulnerable not only with you, but with Erin, Kyle, and Satoshi, who have also rendered themselves vulnerable through their being-with in the process of this project. No, we can’t write, or relate, or story our lives and construct the self alone. Writing our voice—as in, constructing, devising, collaborating our multiplicity—won’t stop once we hit “send” and these words encounter an other audience. (send)

Derek:

Collaborative writing allows us to simultaneously step into and out of the hyphens we work in our relationships—to frame our self as a mètissage. The moments we write here embody our relational collaborations, at once reflecting upon and constructing our shifting relational identities. When did you and I shift from student-advisor to friends to writing partners? When did Kyle and Satoshi shift from student-advisor to collaborators? When did Erin and I shift from brother-sister to writing partners? When did you and Kyle shift from conference acquaintances to student-teacher to friends? Were these shifts strategic? Writing together helps us to both substantiate the material reality of these relational dynamics, as well as to demystify the false dichotomy such relational differences purport to uphold. In many ways, the shift never happened, because the shift is always happening. (send)

Sandy:

If we understand “you” to be an instantiation of the self, then this shift troubles the “you”s and “I”s in collaboration. (send)

Derek:

Right! In collaborative writing, by “you” I mean your words, which are you… and apparently me and Satoshi and Kyle and Erin and who knows who else. Doesn’t that make it even better? It does for me. (send)

Polyvocality

As we develop the hyphen, we equally develop that unfinishedness that is part of our ontological constitution. This not only comes through the act of collaborative writing but also through the act of collaborative reading. Reading isn’t just about reading, but about developing a relationship with the text and the author. It can be a praxis in itself, embodying the notion of relationships re-constituting traditional assumptions of relational development across time and space. For us, this calls attention to issues of relational agency as articulated in voice. We believe that writing informs the development of voice, yes. And no. Collaborative writing engages voice, though not as a singularity; instead, such writing highlights voice-in-relationship, voice-across-difference. Mairs (2000) troubles this notion of finding a voice, as if it had been lost, or missing, or never-present. Instead, she challenges readers/writers/speakers to consider find in the sense of devise, to invent or create a voice. The problem, Mairs continues, is that when we talk of finding a voice, we assume that voice to belong to a singular person (p. 158). In our CAE, we trouble the idea of voice, of understanding writing as something that (1) belongs to a (2) singular person. Furthermore, Pennycook (1994) draws from an array of critical scholars in taking issue with the idea of voice, particularly in the context of language use (and for us, language use in writing). He writes, “Voice is not just a non-silence, a [writing] of words . . . it is a place of struggle in the space between language, discourse and subjectivity” (p. 311). As active audience witnesses, our writing is always already a relational praxis. Through collaborative writing, we understand the polyvocality of any utterance, of any written word, of any thought. (Unfortunately, the limits of language render difficult the writing of this polyvocality.) We also understand the ambiguity of ownership and belonging. Foucault (1984) argues that “the coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences” (p. 101). Collaborative writing resists this individualization, instead calling into being ideas—and specifically for us, relationships—as collective, intersubjective constructions. It is a reclaiming of the hyphen as a space rife with polyvocality and multiplicity. We use CAE to explore what it might mean for us to be in relationship with one another, for each of our supposedly singular voices to instead be polyvocal constructions of intersubjectivity. We excavate the community that we form as scholars, together, the five of us. We also excavate the nested communities that forged within our relationships, as a result of our collaborative writing. Derek underscored the ways his writing—his voice—evokes Sandy’s influence, or perhaps more appropriately, Sandy’s identity, in effect melding the two of them together. Sandy and Satoshi each expressed their appreciation for how their multi-contextual collaboration over the years has been indispensible to their identity development. This collaborative writing rendered recognizable the ways that Sandy and Erin bore witness to one another during Erin’s performance, ways that, before this writing, were inarticulable. Their abilities to draw upon one another’s linguistic differences accentuate the politics of language, particularly in the academy. Together, they grapple with the “business” of graduate school writing while also being careful with one another as unfinished friends. They help one another devise their voice, their collaborative, intersubjective voice.

CAE as Inquiry

Speedy (2012) espouses the “embodied and imagined accumulation of selves and stories” (p. 355). This collaborative writing project asks: What might we imagine, yet never articulate, about our relational others? How does writing function as a mechanism by which we may more fully embody the stories of our relational hyphens? Just as Pineau (2012) writes to conjure those deceased collaborators, we write collaboratively to conjure relational experiences that seem to have deceased. We conjure those experiences to recover and venerate their spirits within our relationships-in-the-present. CAE challenges us to turn the microscope onto our relationships, while also honoring the ways our relationships are the microscopes through which we examine our lives. It illuminates the ways we are implicated in one another’s lives, the ways we are who we are—as individuals—because we are in relationships with one another. While Erin and Derek have known one another nearly their whole lives, writing with one another, in the space of others, gives them different ways to understand how Erin’s survival of domestic abuse informs their sibling relationship. Sandy and Kyle’s interactions off of the page changed as a result of writing about their pedagogical relationship on the page—they became more careful with one another and with their pedagogical others. Their collaborative writing experience—while perhaps not traditional in the sense that the individual narratives were co-written—absolutely shaped the profile of their relationship in the present moment. Satoshi’s active witnessing of Sandy, Derek, and Erin’s writing functioned as inquiry into the embodied, relational labor we do. As CAE, our “self” narratives (our autoethnographies) invite a certain kind of dialogic writing/audiencing and audiencing/writing that inspired the becoming of a community of scholar/inquirers through exploring politics of relationships, in relationship.

Kyle

However, I still find it difficult to write in ways that include me because of the privileged corporeal and cultural locations I occupy. As a White, middle-class, straight male, it seems that to include myself at all serves to reproduce those logics which are oppressive to other ways of being. I know that I cannot get rid of my body, escape my Whiteness or class background, and yet I do not know if I can write without perpetuating hurt and inequality. At the same time, erasing myself from the text continues the colonizing tradition of the (supposedly) objective and neutral author. I do not want to hide behind the modernist conceit that writing is universal, authoritative, and finalizable. As I search for an answer, I hear a voice in my head keep insisting, “work the hyphen . . . work the hyphen . . . work the hyphen.” The work is never done.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Sandra L. Pensoneau-Conway is an assistant professor and introductory course director in the Department of Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her teaching and research interests include critical communication pedagogy, communication and identity, and automethodology. She received her MS (2001) and PhD (2006) in Speech Communication from Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Derek M. Bolen is an assistant professor and graduate advisor of communication in the Department of Communication and Mass Media at Angelo State University. His teaching and research interests include relational communication, autoethnography, and collaborative writing. He received his PhD (2012) in Communication from Wayne State University.

Satoshi Toyosaki is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He teaches and researches intercultural communication, particularly from interpretive and critical paradigms. His research interests include autoethnography, ethnographic methods, critical theory, and critical subjectivity.

C. Kyle Rudick (MA, West Virginia University) is a doctoral student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His research interests include critical communication pedagogy, intercultural communication, and philosophy of communication.

Erin K. Bolen is a sexual assault victims’ rights advocate in northern Michigan. She received her BA (2007) in anthropology and communication from Central Michigan University.

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