Spry’s Autoethnography and the Other (Me): My Love Story With Tami,the Gatekeeper Who Invited Me In

Let’s begin:

Writing was the only ritual I could enact, words the only thing my body could feel. Having broken into little pieces, my subject position went from a destabilized “me” to a chaotic but oddly comforting “we.” Pieces of selves became others manifesting language and constructing a plural and kinesis sense of self that seemed to navigate the interrelations between self/other/bodies/language (Spry, 2006, p. 340).

I wasn’t aware of her loss.

I wasn’t aware of her pain.

I have told and written this story so many times . . .

May 2005

My first conference and I was so scared.

I knew I didn’t belong.

However, I also knew that my wife, Dani, and my babies would be there . . . for me!

Dani and the babies were, are, my WE.

What I couldn’t have known is that SHE would be there!

What I couldn’t have known is that She would see me and mine!

That SHE would acknowledge me!

Protect me . . .

And I didn’t know of her loss.

“Writing is the only ritual I could enact.”

Professor Spry saw in me when there wasn’t much to see,

She saw what I couldn’t see on me,

what I didn’t know I have

And SHE saw me!

I wasn’t aware of her loss.

“Having broken into little pieces, my subject position went from a destabilized “me” to a chaotic but oddly comforting “we.”

Different marks, turning points, of our encounter . . . Tami embraced me before the performance when I finally found the courage or desperation was too much and I entered the room.

Tami welcomed me right there, before I said a word.

Some people call it magic, and they might be right.

Me? I am from the streets. Organically, you must learn to read people, to access a situation. You must understand the places you don’t belong when you dare to enter them because you know . . .

your body knows, you are not welcomed, you are not safe. But there was such a strength in that woman.

I instantly knew that I would be okay, that I wasn’t going to get more hurt (besides how the writing and the performance can hurt, because we don’t engage in this work to feel good). I instantly had the certainty that I would be safe in an unsafe place.

And I knew in the moment of our embrace there was kindness in that woman that allowed my body to relax a little bit. Just a bit you know, because you know, you must assess the danger . . . There was so much at stake at that moment.

Dani, my children Analua and Francisco, and me, and a monthly 900-dollar budget. Detail for only 9 of the 12 months in a year.

I was scared. My babies were there. Dani was there . . . You know the fear that Dani would leave the room with our hopes crashed.

Academics can be and often are cruel.

You have no idea, I didn’t even know back then that what I wrote, what I did may be called performance.

By some.

It is easy for me today to embrace the academic fraud I know I am!

It wasn’t easy then!

But Tami was there, and that was more than enough.

I knew when I got home that night, it would be a good dinner.

You see? I knew I just met a working-class woman with dreadlocks, with a working-class mentality that hasn’t forgot, that will never forget. From where I come from and now, from where I stand, that is one of the best compliments I can offer to a person.

Tami Spry doesn’t forget.

During her performance in that panel, drinking in her words, emersed in her performance, I really became aware . . . I knew with my whole body . . . it was like . . .

When I read Freire in my teens.

I believed then, and still do now, Paulo wrote for me, even though I know that Freire did not know who the fuck I am. But see, I also believe that the reason that Freire could write what he did is because he knew me . . . of me . . . me and my bunch.

No need to call me crazy. I know that I am crazy? I said it here, Paulo Freire wrote for me! Paulo wrote what he did because of me! Please don’t question my (in)sanity!

That was what I felt during Tami’s performance, even if I cannot ever relate to the specific loss she has and the specific pain she has suffered.

Professor Spry knew me, knew of me.

Yes, Tami Spry and Paulo Freire . . . way up there in my world. Again, from where I come from and now, from where I stand, that is one of the best compliments I can offer to a person.

Love and respect generosity, from the

Body

Paper

Stage

Tami Spry is theory and method!

Tami is performance.

Tami Spry is love.

Kindness.

With a purpose.

In 2013, at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, keynote speaker Laurel Richardson, addressing senior scholars, stated “Be a gatekeeper who opens doors.”

Love and kindness with a purpose. The critical kind. Critical from critical theory.

Critical love and kindness = Tami Spry.

A gatekeeper who opens gates!

I am talking about the intervention that allows graduate degrees to be complete, that allows for salaries and positions, that allows researchers exist in the margins of the neoliberal education system that permeates our beautiful campuses. Please allow me to be clear here in my critique. A few lucky ones will have a tenure-track job, and even fewer will survive the tenure and promotion process. It is not about quality only either; in this room, among our friends and colleagues, former and present students, we all know excellent researchers, writers, and teachers who can never find a permanent position. That is the cruelty of a neoliberal education at its worst.

A gatekeeper who opens gates!

Among the many gifts Tami gave me, there was one that has been essential to my survival in this world of scholarshit.

Legitimacy!

Few offered it to me when I really needed it!

Many of the few are here in this room.

Professor Spry offered me the gift of legitimacy.

SHE smuggled me through the borders.

Later SHE stamped my passport.

SHE signed my Green Card.

I will never be a full citizen of the traditional Academe, and that’s okay because you see, Tami Spry is not a citizen of that Academe either. Spry inhabits the margins. She will never be a citizen of THAT academy I am criticizing here.

“. . . this isn’t a conference, this is QI, this is a place where bodies do not rush or slip away to a hotel room for conference sex, this is a place of desire, a place in desire, a place where epistemologically enfleshed methodologies are consummated, and collide, publicly, politically, pedagogically, personally.” (Spry, 2010, p. 234)

Spry’s performances enlarge the margins by making places for people like me to exist.

Love and kindness with a purpose. The critical kind. Critical from critical theory.

Critical love and kindness = Tami Spry

And yes, it is intentional. Tami is everything but naïve.

Tami legitimates my body, my right to be

Here.

I am a professor, me? However, most important, she helps to legitimate my WE. We are all bodies, bones and meat and blood and hair. We also are the ones we love. Dani is still with me, and my babies are attending college, can you believe it?

My babies are in college. Love, kindness, respect, legitimacy

Then it was 2005, and now my babies are in a college, a generational transformation. Claudio’s babies are in college! Thank you.

That critical intervention in 2005 was the real applied research, from 2005 to 2023 and counting . . .

Concrete transformations, A cycle has been broken!

Borrowing from Dm Soyini Madison (2009), Tami Spry is dangerous to power!

Tami Spry is Cherrie Moraga’s Theories of the Flesh (Moraga & Anzaldua, 1981)

Tami Spry enacts the words of Dwight Conquergood’s 2002 famous essay, in The Drama Review, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.”

Tami Spry is Dwight’s Kinesis.

Thank you, Tami, for opening the gates for me and mine to pass through.

Thank you for keeping them open.

And gatekeepers who open gates don’t retire! Public intellectuals such as Professor Spry always live, even when they are not in this place we call earth, even in the improbability that their words one day fade . . .

They mark our beings, our words, and worlds.

They act, they teach, they perform

community and social justice.

It is an extremely important and hard labor.

One person at a time, one student at a time, one being at a time. It is a constant everyday task that multiplies by the lives they touch.

And as Tami said Wednesday in her performance, “Face to Face” Plenary Performance at International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) 2023, she’s retired but not dead. What I am simply saying here is that her work doesn’t retire.

It is alive and well.

It is here among us.

It is us.

Then, it was May 2005, now it is now.

My daughter, in a certain aspect, came of age in 2016. In that fatidic election night, she asked me: “How a young Latina woman can exist is a country where that man is a president.” She is now a writer, an activist, and just finished her second year in college. Last week or so, we were having a conversation about theory and her trying to find her place among her peers in college.

She was expressing her frustrations of not being accepted as a woman of color because her skin wasn’t brown enough, of not being Latina enough because she doesn’t speak Spanish, and of not being queer enough because her boyfriend is a cisgender heterosexual male. My daughter was pushing me for an academic conversation about identities and everyday lives. She was throwing around the names of books and authors she has been reading.

Inside me, I was thinking.

A “performative-I” co-presence, (Spry, 2011)

Autoethnography and the Other, (Spry, 2016)

And the other Other

Analua usually calls me Claudio. Sometimes, when she’s trying to annoy me or just be funny, she calls me MY Dude.

That day in that conversation, I flipped the script and told my daughter; “My Dude, you really should read the work of Tami Spry because she’s fabulous.”

And she already knows you! A young woman, not brown enough, queer enough, Portuguese speaker Latina.

She already sees you!

And she already loves you!

Let’s finish:

Writing was the only ritual I could enact, words the only thing my body could feel. Having broken into little pieces, my subject position went from a destabilized “me” to a chaotic but oddly comforting “we.” Pieces of selves became others manifesting language and constructing a plural and kinesis sense of self that seemed to navigate the interrelations between self/other/bodies/language (Spry, 2006, p. 340).

I wasn’t aware of her loss.

I wasn’t aware of her pain.

I wasn’t aware of her suffering.