Abstract
In this autoethnography regarding the writing and sharing of an educational autofiction, I explore the vulnerability inherent in moving from the imagined to the real in a pedagogical context. Autoethnographic fiction is a scholarly method with the potential to disrupt traditional, science-based discourses dominant in health profession education. This potential was enacted in a senior undergraduate dietetics class when students were invited to read and write their own autoethnographies. Marked by vulnerability, I came to embody the transformative theory of being unfinalized as I endeavoured to resist the way things have always been in dietetics and make visible the emotional process of writing autoethnographic fiction as a move towards personal and social transformation.
The First Class—Beginning Again
“Welcome to the Art of Storytelling,” I began. “We are embarking on something altogether different this term, something that has likely never been done before in our profession. We are going to write the stories of our lives as a means for strengthening our food and nutrition practice.” I smiled expectantly at the students, whose faces displayed a curious mix of confusion, wonder, and eagerness.
In this introduction, I felt an enormous sense of. . . anticipation, longing, and vulnerability. I had imagined this course during my doctoral studies, integrated it into my autoethnography, and now, in my second year as a tenure-track faculty member, it was becoming real.
This article details the process of offering my autoethnography for dietetic students to consider and critique at the same time as I invited them to write of their own lives. The experience was accompanied by the vague notion that someone would knock on my classroom door and tell me to stop writing my life, to stop supporting students in writing theirs—insisting that storytelling was not appropriate in dietetics, and that I was a fraud. The knock never came, but the feeling never vanished.
I am a Dietitian
I was trained in a positivist tradition to consider food as nutrition, as a substance to be quantified in the pursuit of health. I was trained to consider people seeking my knowledge as rational, autonomous, predictable, and mostly decontextualized from their actual lives. I was trained to calculate and inform—“Too much fat: drink skim milk”; “Too little protein: eat skinless chicken breast”; “Too little calcium: eat yogurt”; “Too little iron: eat beef”; “Too much coffee: drink water.” I was trained to imagine myself, calculator in hand, acting certain if somewhat distracted from the human beings actually seeking my expertise—to see myself simply telling people what they should and should not consume.
Soon, my lovely illusion was interrupted. People were saying things to me that I was not expecting to hear. My training did not prepare me for comments such as, “I feel an immense sense of power after eating all I want and throwing up afterwards.” My training did not prepare me for comments such as, “Eating slowly and minding my hunger cues brings back memories of childhood sexual abuse. I have to eat fast. That’s why I’m fat.” My training did not prepare me for comments such as, “What gives you the right to tell me what to eat?” My training did not prepare me for comments such as, “I hate my body! I won’t eat that. It has too much fat. I’m overwhelmed. I don’t want to be here. I want to die!” I soon realized that no amount of nutritional science was going to help me respond to these people, to their pain, and to my own astonishment. I needed to venture across paradigmatic borders. I studied feminist texts (Aphramor and Gingras, 2009). I woke up to other realities.
This process of waking up involved facing a dilemma of another sort. If I was not prepared for such comments from patients and clients, and dietetic education is relatively standard across Canada, was it not likely that other dietitians were feeling similarly unprepared in their experiences of nutrition counselling practice? If dietitians were unprepared for these decidedly awkward, ethically delicate situations, how were they responding? I heard stories from clients that my dietitian colleagues were not responding well. People told me they were surprised to be in my office since, after some previously humiliating experiences they had promised themselves they would never again see a dietitian. It was clear to me that my colleagues and I were struggling to do the right thing, but that we were unprepared to address the issues that faced our clients, and us, and for the sheer complexity of our work.
I felt compelled to return to university to research dietitians’ experiences of their education. As I combed through texts written by critical pedagogues, I became aware that dietetic education could, and possibly should, look and feel different than it does. I began to think about how my future would have been different had I the experience of being a student of critical feminist nutrition pedagogy; how might have this transformative experience reflexively initiated me into the profession of dietetic practice. I talked to my sister colleagues, my research co-participants, and realized that they indeed were stressed; many of them imagined leaving the profession. Some of them experienced what they described as “a living death,” “depression,” and “a crisis of identity.” I had never heard or read of these kinds of experiences in the dietetics literature. It was heartbreaking, but strangely consoling to realize that I was not alone.
During my doctoral studies, I became aware that in seeking to know the other, we come to know ourselves. I chose to study dietitians’ experience because it was my experience. I chose to examine dietetic education because I am a dietetic educator. I teach and mentor undergraduate and graduate food and nutrition students. I spend time with young people (mostly women) trying to decide if dietetics is the right profession for them. I support new graduates in their attempts to navigate the complex world of professional dietetics. I facilitate workshops for my dietetic colleagues on issues related to size acceptance, eating disorders, and identity. I research the lived realities of dietetic students, interns, and practitioners by asking questions about dietetic epistemology, pedagogy, and the challenges of practice that lead to job stress, intent to leave, and burnout. And through all of these commitments, I learn.
I take my role as a dietetic educator seriously, which means that I believe that I am ethically obligated to examine my practices, and that I believe that I can learn to do things better. It was primarily for reasons such as these that I returned to university to begin my doctoral studies. As Crawford and colleagues (1992) observe, “In order to see ourselves as able to change the structures, we must first acknowledge our complicity in our own subordination; that is, that there are benefits as well as costs in maintaining the status quo” (p. 196).
But, I am Not Only a Dietitian
My professional work is not as straightforward as I expected it might be when I entered dietetics. I, too, have a story to tell.
I remember myself as a young woman trying to decide what to do with my life. I was always fascinated with scientific discovery and had done well academically in the life sciences. But my health was a different story. I struggled with Crohn’s disease from the time I was 17. Crohn’s disease is a debilitating, painful gastrointestinal disease—an autoimmune illness—for which there is no certain cause or cure. I sought mainstream and alternative medical help to deal with my condition and I became interested in my nutritional health through working with a naturopath. In addition to an intense regime of steroids, I tried a variety of approaches to deal with the diarrhea, gas, bloating, cramping, constipation, and unrelenting pain. Although my naturopathic doctor’s prescribed treatment of slippery elm bark, charcoal tablets, homeopathic tinctures, and whole foods sparked my curiosity for how my body could be healed by what I ate, eventually my intestinal ulcers became so severe that the lining of my gut was perforated—tiny little pinpricks where ruthless intestinal ulcers had eaten through the flesh of my intestine. I was succumbing to the disease. I developed a high fever and had to undergo an emergency operation to remove part of my bowel. I was scared and powerless.
After my operation, my pain miraculously disappeared. I was instructed to eat nutritious food, be active, and get plenty of rest. I was gifted with a second chance and quickly realized that when my life became unbalanced, my body became unbalanced. (During a session with my naturopathic doctor, he had asked me what I did for relaxation and play. I’d had no response.) I began to truly understand that feeling whole, healthy, and happy was not just about what food I put in my mouth. I had to be careful. And, I decided that I wanted to help others learn how to be careful, so I renewed my commitment to an education in food and nutrition.
I also remember thinking before I started in dietetics that once I learned more about nutrition, I would find it so much easier to control my weight. My perspective at that time was naïve. I was seduced by the promise that nutritional expertise equated corporeal domination. I dreamed of not having to struggle to calculate the exact number of calories and nutrients I needed to stay thin. I would learn to master my body by becoming a dietitian.
The more I learned about nutrition, the more obsessed I became about my body. As it turned out, beginning my undergraduate program helped me to learn something far more important than the caloric value of food. Halfway through my studies, I left my husband—a man who instilled in me, through his speech and actions, a conviction that my value as a woman was undeniably connected to my shape. I remember him threatening to leave me if I ever gained weight, and consistently remarking on the attractiveness of other women’s bodies. I learned to compare myself to other women and to compete with them for his attention. My efforts to control my nutritional intake and expenditure were really efforts to ease the pain of being objectified, not only by him but also by a vast patriarchal order. The valuable lesson I began to learn then is one I put to use even to this day: when I bump up against that hard, unrelenting edge of body loathing, shame, and silence, I use what I learned of feminism to challenge and revise my bodily experiences towards acceptance and compassion.
Telling Our Story
The decision of “how” to tell my research story was not as easy. My poststructural tendencies had me wary of traditional social science representation that manifests itself as a reflection of the real. Gergen and Gergen (2002) explain the realist posture as restricting dialogue and alienating readers from conversation, both of which circumstances I wanted to avoid. Instead, I preferred to assemble a text that acknowledged the following:
We cannot escape discourse. We can move within discourse, find fissures, ruptures and contradictions to move with or against. We can . . . turn up and down, interrupt or leave alone—in the search for alternative ways to push and move the already constituted towards new discursive practices. (Søndergaard, 2005, p. 298) If much of the world is vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all, then where does this leave social science? (p. 2)
On the recommendation of my doctoral committee, I looked to autoethnography. This methodology, and more specifically autoethnographic fiction, revealed itself as a method for situating and positioning my dissertation within a larger tradition of qualitative inquiry. Autoethnographic movements came into play through multiple and polyvocal conversations as I embarked on the research process, all the while taking reflexive field notes, attending to the emotional dimension of my conversations, writing poetry, and listening to the stories my colleagues shared.
Re/Living the Autofictive Choice
As I moved through the process of developing my research ideas, I grappled with the question of how, as a feminist scholar, I might engage with present phenomena in such a manner as to offer transformative alternatives and to reorganize my view of the world in which the phenomena are produced. This question was predicated on the assertion that research can and should be political, and that researchers have the privilege and ethical responsibility to attend to dimensions of social justice in their scholarly endeavours. Foucault (1977) understands that “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (p. 194). Power further complicates any desire for transformative alternatives, since power is also exerted on the scholar. Davies (2000) elaborates on power being “not a thing or an essence that can be described, but a complex set of relations amongst people and in the relations between people and knowledge systems—or patterns of discourse” (p. 18). My question of method was not to be taken separately from power. If my research intention was to be political and relational, involving language and knowledge, I must also recognize power, in its myriad forms.
I came to realize that I cannot write of educational phenomena without acknowledging how power produces, constricts, and extorts reality. If I choose to write about lived experiences, I can only hope to write from a perspective of what I attempt to make real. Through the entire process, power bears down on me. In reading others’ texts, in representing those texts, and in hearing what I should know, I am subject to power. Power is written into and through me. I cannot escape power, nor do I try.
In choosing to write of myself as a cultured-gendered performative, as a White, educated, queer, nondisabled, fat female dietitian, I choose to write autoethnographically. I make visible the invisible, unscrutinized experience of a (dietetic) culture from my position inside that culture. Although not the first to coin the term, Ellis and Bochner (2000) define autoethnography as “an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (p. 739). As José Limón says (as quoted in Behar, 2003), “However ‘liberating’ a narrative discourse we propose to write, it is one always intimate with power, and many of our ‘informants,’ ‘subjects,’ ‘consultants,’ ‘teachers,’ and ‘friends’ know it” (p. 247). And perhaps because of this intimate knowing, autoethnography is not a method with which I am permitted to engage within certain academic locations. From such positions, autoethnography remains forbidden.
One might infer that if autoethnography is undesirable in such locations, my experience is also unacceptable. I assume one would be correct. I admit that my making this autoethnographic choice, deliberately and thoughtfully, is condoned through privilege. My autoethnographic choice is in play only because of the creative risks taken by those who have made public their work before me (Deck, 1990; Ellis, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2004; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Hayano, 1979; Lionnet, 1989; Reed-Danahay, 1997; Richardson, 1997). These scholars, among others, permit me the opportunity to explicate power autoethnographically, and I choose to do so.
Autoethnographic writers are encouraged to explore a variety of representational media. Mary and Kenneth Gergen(2002) describe the relational potential when the self as ethnographic exemplar becomes free from the traditional conventions of writing: “One’s unique voicing—filled with colloquialisms, reverberations from multiple relationships, and emotional expressiveness—is honoured” (p. 14). Crawford and colleagues (1992) politicize the autoethnographic process by insisting that researchers should refuse to engage with patriarchal structures and the accompanying rules, but instead find “alternative ways of doing things, including alternative, women-centred ways of doing research. . .” (p. 196–197). Performing autoethnographically reduces the distance between researchers and participants by initiating relationships. Autoethnographers are summoned to acknowledge the telling history of their tradition, and to extend the gesture with sensitivity, humility, and reciprocity. “Autoethnographically” is one way to answer the question of how we might engage with phenomena so as to offer transformative possibilities.
My academic journey might be aptly described as a succession of border crossings; the experience of pleasure and tension with sometimes inadvertent, sometimes deliberate, excursions beyond structure. My journey is also infused with the exuberance of learning, and the relationships that sustain and complexify learning. To know of me is to know of these things.
Here, I explore the process of choosing to perform autoethnographically, a deeply political, moral choice with inherent personal risks—but at the same time a choice to which I remain obliged, given my concern with offering transformative possibilities to reorganize my view of the world and the views of students (colearners) in the classroom with me.
Autoethnography as a Methodological Choice
Autoethnographies assume a diverse array of forms, including personal essays, poetry, fiction, novels, journals, social science prose, and short stories (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). Autoethnographic research brings together feminism, biography, cultural studies, personal experience, narrative inquiry, and autobiography. Diverse strands of personal theorizing when “woven together with other critical projects can bring light to codified, ritualized, and often unquestioned practices” (Wear, 1997, p. 6). Research on dietetic identity, education, and practice is scarce, such that these practices have remained largely unquestioned. On these grounds, it seems appropriate that autoethnography be used to explore themes of dietetic identity, education, and practice.
Of the range of approaches to autoethnography, reflexive autoethnography—whereby the researcher uses her “own experiences in the culture reflexively to bend back on self and look more deeply at self-other interactions”—is most clearly suited to this study of the culture of dietetics (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 740). Reflexive ethnography is an especially apt approach when we consider that dietetics is “a site of multiple and complex subjectivities—mostly nondisabled, heterosexual, thin female bodies, subordinately positioned in medical hierarchies, sustained by corporeal/cultural expressions, and complicated by infinite food politics” (Gingras, 2008, p. 3). This is a feminist endeavour. As Reinharz (1992) suggests, to begin with a woman’s personal experience is an assurance that the researcher will be starting from the standpoint of women.
Autoethnography opposes the essentializations of any group by simultaneously trying to understand the tensions within the researcher, and between the researcher, the research process, and the issues being researched as a means to expose the power relationships within a culture (Berry, 2005). This is a moral, ethical undertaking and—to understate the case—highly delicate work. How each of us choose to represent these experiences is the challenge. Do we follow others’ rules or do we make up our own? “Do we … have the guts to say, ‘You may not like it, but here I am’?” (Krieger, 1991, p. 244).
When I was writing my dissertation I yearned for a method that would push the already constituted, traditional dietetics discourses in new directions. And, I do mean push. Nutrition discourse is not easily shifted; it has remained virtually static for over a century, entrenched in reductionist science so impenetrable it has become a victim of its own preservation. Messy knowledges about food and eating and bodies do not often align with more pristine knowledges gleaned from randomized control trials. Humans are not rational, predictable, or autonomous and mercifully, some writers have started to critique the ethics of pretending that they are (Buchanan, 2004). Most people in academia know this, but it rarely stops nutritional scientists from carrying on with knowledge generation that has little bearing on real lives. I digress, partly.
I found an appropriately rogue method in autoethnographic fiction. I wrote (what I hoped was) an ethical and evocative autofiction intertwining my experiences as a dietitian with my conversations with sister dietitians (provided with pseudonyms), with published autoethnographic exemplars, and with my imagination. I nested my “story” between two other genres; an academic defense (read: literature review) of autoethnography, plus a more traditional sociological articulation of my research findings (Gingras, 2011). This was my dissertative triptych and creating it was a marvelous and intense experience of scholarly artistic exertion. I successfully defended this work in February 2006. The most memorable moment of that defense for me came when one of my external examiners shared that as she started reading the autoethnographic fiction, she found herself putting down her editing pencil and becoming absorbed by the story. That is what Bochner (2000) promised evocative autoethnography would achieve; to “help the reader or listener to understand and feel the phenomena under scrutiny” (p. 270). In putting down her pencil, perhaps she opened herself to understanding and feeling the phenomena of dietitians’ lives including the inherent challenges, dilemmas, and joys.
In my autoethnographic fiction, entitled Longing for Recognition (Gingras, 2009), I wrote about a character, a dietetic educator named Tess Leung. She was troubling the dietetic establishment as much as she was troubled by it. She wanted to teach dietetic students about critical social theory and in so doing enable them to artfully and intellectually disrupt the dietetic canon. Students in Tess’ dietetic undergraduate class had ambivalent feelings about Tess’ aims. I wrote about how they were undone by their experiences in that classroom as they grappled with their becoming in ways they had never predicted. Tess’ friend, Jacqui (that is me in the third person), working hard to complete her PhD, and also very much interested in breaking away from the status quo, was her confidante. Tess, Jacqui, and two other dietitian colleagues decided to start meeting regularly to talk through some of the unspeakable challenges in their work. These relationships became a central feature of the story, the site of learning for readers and for the author (me).
My learning did not end with the writing of this story. My intent was that the story would be made available for scrutiny by a wider audience, including dietetic students and educators. I wrote the autoethnography in 13 chapters to coincide with the 13 weeks of a typical university semester. To anyone who has read Carolyn Ellis’ work (2004), this structure will sound familiar. As I was fashioning my text to mimic a course, I discovered the The Ethnographic I and realized that I had a published exemplar for what I intended to do. Ellis’ text afforded me the confidence and the path through which to create my story. I e-mailed Dr. Ellis the day I brought her book home from the bookstore and acknowledged the timing and significance of her contribution. “We are indelibly connected,” I wrote. Her enthusiastic and almost immediate reply enlivened my writing and buoyed me through the weeks and months before I finished the dissertation. I am grateful to Dr. Ellis for her creative and courageous autoethnographic impulse.
Shaping Autoethnography to Fit the Classroom
In the postscript of my dissertation, I wrote:
I am tentative about saying what I dream for this research. If I am to be unabashedly honest, I dream of dietetic students entering passionate dialogue upon reading this work supported by dietetic educators and practitioners who are inspired to expand their understanding of the world around them and consider the intersections of the social world with their nutritional science. That feels ambitious! I can barely imagine what transformations our profession might endure, since we ourselves would be transformed by such dialogue and learning. (Gingras, 2006, p. 291)
In my doctoral dissertation, I endeavored to offer pedagogic testimony through the creation of a feminist, reflexive autoethnography. Much of my desire to enter this process arose from a sense of responsibility to my own vocation; I felt obliged to witness and interrogate my practice. Echoing Gergen (1982), my hope for the dissertation was to “challenge the guiding assumptions of the [dietetics] culture, to foster reconsideration of that which is ‘taken for granted,’ and to thereby furnish new alternatives for social action [through dietetic education]” (p. 136). As Smith (1993) asserts, autoethnography can be an effective means for “talking back” to those discourses that have been historically assigned, and to disrupt guiding assumptions. Writing the autoethnography afforded me a sense of empowerment as a means for resisting the dominant canonical discourses of nutritional science. More importantly though, my subjectivity shifted through the writing process itself. Cixous (1991) describes this shifting process by saying “How what affects me comes into language, comes out fully worded, I don’t know. I ‘feel’ it, but it is a mystery itself, which language is unlikely to let through. This mode of passivity is our way—really an active way—of getting to know things by letting ourselves be known by them” (pp. 56–57). And I have become known to myself despite myself—in a flourish, an autotheoretical autoepisiotomy.
Lather (1991) points out that all research represents forms of knowledge and discourse that are inventions about the researchers themselves, which elicit the question “How do practices to discover the truth about ourselves impact on our lives?” (p. 167). Autoethnography is one way of discovering truths and in the process, much is revealed about how this discovery influences the writer’s life. It permits space for reflexivity. “Synergetic knowledge making admits the unruly, private, and ideological dimensions of personal theorizing, theorizing that turns back on itself by analyzing its own production” (Wear, 1997, p. 8). My desire was, and continues to be, that my work be an inquiry grounded in who I am, a living inquiry, an “epistemology of insiderness” (Reinharz, 1992, p. 261). Minh-ha (1989) reminds me of my feminist responsibility when she asserts, “If feminism is set forth as a demystifying force, then it will have to question thoroughly the belief in its own identity” (p. 96). My feminism beckons me to question the belief in my own identity, to demystify, and to foreground the process as it emerges—even when that process gets unruly.
Autoethnographic work is personal and political, and once shared it enters a social dimension—an in-between conversation, “where claims against political order are made in the name of justice” (Forché, 1993, p. 31). Indeed, as Markussen (2005) elaborates through her social and cultural exploration of performativity as a mode of achieving transformation, “[R]esearch needs to enter public space, academic or otherwise—a space that is ‘public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity’” (p. 330). This act of making visible the invisible is transformative in and of itself. Studying “diverse women’s lives as sources of their research epistemologies leads me to consider how a field’s previous epistemological weavings may shift and change, or simply come undone, as new and divergent lives come to spin its intellectual core” (Neumann & Peterson, 1997, p. 3).
As I inquire into alternative ways of understanding myself and my practice, it remains my responsibility to resist the tendency towards positivism and mastery, and instead to share stories and remain open to shifting epistemologies. I have found this process of resistance to be most laborious, admitting that perhaps my positivistic tendencies are sometimes too powerful, too embedded to disrupt. The reader may sense the overwhelming tension arising from my struggle. I am called to remember that “the reflexive qualities of human communication should not be bracketed in the name of science” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 743). I imagine myself snapping positivistic brackets across my knee like brittle kindling in preparation to light a firestorm that incites a truly powerful paradigm shift within dietetics. Sometimes the wood is too wet to burn.
Notes About Fiction and Truth
Storytelling: her words set into motion the forces that lie dormant in things and beings. (Minh-ha, 1989, p. 147)
The fictive aspects of my work are analogous to “autofiction,” a term coined by Lecarme and Lecarme (as quoted by Yamade, 2005) to describe “an unleashed autobiography” (p. 268). Hybridizing autoethnography and fiction enables reconfigurations of the self while simultaneously dismantling and reconstructing the self, so that subjectivity and otherness always coexist. Autofiction relies on imagination, and imagination nourishes dietetic practice (Berenbaum, 2005). An impoverished imagination glorifies the status quo by silencing and repressing vulnerable texts (Gingras, 2005a). I have been encouraged, in the words of Berenbaum (2005), to “think outside the box, to take risks, to challenge the status quo” (p. 196). Choosing to create an autofictional representation of my doctoral research on dietitians’ experience of their education was my response to Berenbaum’s invitation to nourish dietetic practice, and to respond to my research participants’ appeal that their practical wisdom would be translated into a political text. My desire was to create a frame bold enough to cultivate participants’ stories while at the same time sparking the reader’s imagination. Bochner (2000) says this is true also for autoethnographers, in that they want to produce innovative, evocative texts that attempt to sustain—not destroy—imaginative impulses. “What if this were true? What then?” (Bochner, 2000, p. 267).
In what I have interpreted as a call for reflexive autoethnography and a concern for how reality is (mis)represented, Markussen (2005) invites researchers into a process of “transforming the traditional backstage of research—its process of making—into its performative possibility” (p. 341). Markussen politicizes her invitation suggesting,
Such openness increases the ability to enact shifts in the phenomenon being studied, and thus also sharpens the transformative power of feminism. Refusing an enactment of the outcomes of research as ‘after the fact’, such transformative modes of relating seem to be called for in order to develop effective ways of engaging with the present. (pp. 330–331)
Feminist researchers experimenting with voice are developing effective, if not “messy,” ways of engaging with present phenomena. Jackson (2003) suggests, “The various deployments, critiques, and reconfigurations of voice in feminist research are circular, interconnected, and deterritorializing” (p. 693). In considering the process of creating autoethnographic fiction, the multiplicitous, transgressive, and unruly autoethnographic voices may be represented as “rhizovocal,” using the image of the rhizome offered by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as a system of tuberous root-like structures that have no origin, but instead consist of multiple underground nonlinear interconnections. It is the rhizvocality that is manifested by lines of articulation in relationship with each other—autoethnography and fiction for example—which makes possible political deterritorialization (Jackson, 2003). Law (2004) contends that this textured, creative process “cannot be disassociated from whatever is being made, word by word” (p. 12). We permit what emerges then as an autoethnographic “method assemblage” whereby social scientific processes become unravelled and disrupted, and social scientists find ways of living uncertainly—without fixity, conclusion, or finality.
With regard to fictive feminist realities, “[L]iterature and history once were/still are stories: this does not necessarily mean that the space they form is undifferentiated, but that this space can articulate on a different set of principles, one which maybe said to stand outside the hierarchical realm of facts” (Minh-ha, 1989, p. 121). We might consider the “truth” of a story to be measured outside of objective fact, but inside its tendency to evoke. “Thinking true means thinking in conformity with a certain scientific discourse produced by certain institutions” (Minh-ha, 1989, p. 124). Given the tendency to “think true” as institutionalized discourse, feminists interested in challenging certain scientific discourse might adopt autoethnographic fictions (more feeling true, less thinking true) as political and disruptive storytellings capable of refreshing, regenerating, and enlarging the notion of dietitian performativity (Gingras, 2011).
Consider how the reading of autoethnographic fiction generates reaction among its readers. Markussen (2005) uses her experience of reading Judith Butler as an example:
In opening herself up to this deeply problematic situation, [Judith Butler] aims at nothing less than “reorganizing” the world. One may see this as a naïve aim, or. . .one may pay attention to what happens to oneself in reading her proposals. Did not something shift in how I see the problematic of transsexuality? Clearly, the resistance against Butler’s thinking also speaks of its power to actually enact transformations in the minds of her readers, and perhaps beyond. (p. 332)
Encountering Autoethnographic Writers and Readers
For autoethnographic fiction to offer a transformative potential, I believe reader response is crucial. How might we attend to what happens in response to reading autoethnography, in response to feeling true? Perhaps, feminist authors engaged in writing autofiction may calibrate the transformative potential of their work through the resistance it evokes. Markussen (2005) states that an “effective engagement with the present needs to proceed from a recognition of the coproduction of research and reality, needs to refuse the notion that reality already happened” (pp. 341–342). When we consider the constituting force of language, of the writer’s powerful ability to wield language in a manner that constructs a particular view of reality, we can acknowledge that all research texts are fictions, or what Strathern (1987) identifies as “persuasive fictions” (p. 251). Admitting scholarly work to be persuasive fiction “forces a recognition of the rhetorical features in any piece of scholarly writing” (Sparkes, 1995, p. 160). Fiction brings forth recognition, and in so doing might be considered pedagogical. Coles (1989) remarks that one keeps learning by teaching fiction since reader responses have their own “startling, suggestive power” (p. xix). Reader response enables a fictive text its pedagogical power in that when we engage with such text, we are bound to be moved, to learn, to encounter the self, and to know of the Other. It is my desire that my autofictive text elicit a dynamic, polyvocal array of responses, so that it lives up to its pedagogical potential.
Responses and resistances may well be another criterion for readers to apply when assessing the scholarly capacity of autoethnographic fiction. What did the writing elicit in others? How are others’ responses fictionalized according to particular perspectives on reality, language, and power? What did the writing elicit in the self? How does this merging of elicitations, this dialogic conversation, enlarge the phenomena under consideration? What are my ongoing reflexive gestures able to offer the work of a feminist social science?
It was my intention that my autoethnography provoke critical thinking about dietetic education and practice, and position storytelling as a powerful medium to understanding others. Evocative autoethnography is a suitable method to explore the complexities of dietetic education and practice since “[the] drivers [of a story] are complexity, uncertainty, and revision. [Authoethnography] confounds science’s valorized tenet of absolute truth by exposing the relativity of reality” (Aphramor & Gingras, 2009, p. 103). When scholars write auto/ethnographically, they make provocative declarations that honor people’s stories (including the researcher’s interpretation of those stories) as subjective, fluid, and contingent; stories that are justifiably ripe with meaning.
Autoethnography is not simply a pedagogical device, but a way of being in the world: a method and a position. The possibility of autoethnographic fiction is to reinvigorate dietetic discourse, to acknowledge that our doings emerge from our beings, and to strive for socially responsible dietetic practices. In the words of the quantum physicist Zohar (1991), “Truth happens (but) that does not mean that something is rightly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation. . .that which is a whole attains to unconcealment” (p. 85). Unconcealing and making public the lived realities of dietetic students and practitioners brings about a vulnerability, an exposure to being known. This vulnerability is a necessary experience for students as they confront dietetic discourses that position future “patients” as noncompliant, manipulative, misinformed, passive aggressive, and in denial (Whisenant & Smith, 1995). Such positioning attempts to render the Other as oppositional and as an object to be managed. Reading and writing evocative autoethnographies about dietetic education and practice becomes a site for learning the complexity of the human dimension and gaining a deep appreciation for our responsibility—our ability to respond with deep caring and respect—to all others we encounter. Writing autoethnography fosters empathy.
The Discursive Turn
I was able to imitate the course I had written about in my autoethnographic fiction “in reality” with 22 senior undergraduate dietetic students. I gave them the same course reader as the one provided to imaginary students in the imaginary course in Longing for Recognition: a collection of critical social theory articles brought to bear on dietetic practice. In addition, they read a chapter a week of the autoethnography until they finished the story.
Class discussions centred on the themes of the autoethnography, the themes represented in the critical social theory articles, and the process of writing autoethnography. The process of writing was informed by my own experience and by that represented in Ellis’ methodological novel (2004). As part of the course requirements, I invited students to write their own autoethnographies, starting with character development and narrative structure, and progressively weaving together the complex stories of their lives within the culture of their dietetic education. In this way, the students were observers of other dietetic students as characters in my autoethnography, but were also observing and participating in the telling of their own stories.
As time passed and trust developed among us, the students were invited to share their writings as I had shared mine so they could construct and coparticipate in multiple readings and enhanced perspectives of their stories and, ultimately, expand the knowledge and empathy they brought to bear on their professional practice. At first, most of them could not understand how this writing would enhance their practice, but as we came to the end of the term and they grappled with issues of voice, representation, relational ethics, and conflict, almost all of them came to understand that writing their lives was predicated on knowing themselves and the Other. Ellis (2002) describes this as “good” autoethnography—that which moves us towards the Other, turns us towards praxis, veers us inward to engaged social critique, and persists in demonstrating how we might participate in a public healing process. To my mind, the classroom is one place where we might give space for such healing: It had certainly become a place for my own transformation. In this senior dietetics class, many of my students also began to appreciate the transformative power of writing their own lives and its potential impact on their practice.
Transformative Learning Theory Talks Back
In drawing from transformation learning theory to further illuminate the aims of this article, I offer Mezirow’s (2000) view: “Transformation refers to a movement through time of reformulating reified structures of meaning by reconstructing dominant narratives” (p. 19). This movement has been described as starting with a “disorienting dilemma” (Mezirow, 2000, p. 22), which for me was the experience of engaging with my first clients as a nutrition professional, and for the students in the narratives course was engaging with new and critical perspectives on the dietetic profession writ large. Such emotions as fear, anger, guilt, and shame were associated with the resulting self-examination. These feelings provoked an overall state of vulnerability in me and the students; a sense that not all was as it seemed, a worry of being found out as wrong, or a recognition that foundational beliefs had been forever altered. There was no going back.
Questions surfaced among the students: How could we not have seen this (disorienting dilemma) coming? How could we have not learned about this before? As we shared our realities through dialogue, we came to know that we were not alone and endeavored to reestablish relationships with each other and the knowledges that were becoming more visible to us (narrative, social theory) amid the new context we were cocreating. Being “in relation” fostered an environment where the emotions shifted from vulnerability and uncertainty to expectancy and hopefulness.
Wilhemson (2002) indicates that “critical reflection can only begin after emotions have been worked through” (p. 191). I saw this as one of the most crucial aspects of our course: creating a place safe enough not only for students to experience disorientation and vulnerability, but for them to work through those feelings productively; a place where healing and reconnection was made possible in growth-fostering relationships (Miller & Stiver, 1997). And, as Southern (2007) explains, “The commitment to a new way of being in relationship is the key to working together to create a learning community that supports the vulnerability and risk associated with transformative learning” (p. 332). We could only create that community collaboratively.
Through the autoethnographic sharing and writing, we discovered new actions and means forward. We experienced a revelation that stories would be one of the new ways of knowing upon which we would rely in our relearning of what it meant to be ethical food and nutrition professionals. As Wilhemson (2002) shared, “In this way a disorienting dilemma creates a state of disequilibrium which can stir us up and force us out of assumptions earlier taken for granted” (p. 188). Again, this disruption creates a fractious moment, as what we have believed for so long has been shaken—and thus, we have been shaken. Exploring this process through writing our own stories was necessary and frightening; often times students would tell me that they had not known what they were going to say, but discovered at the end of a passage that a new insight or understanding of themselves or their situations had emerged. Leitch (2006) says, “The commitment to persist with the process of writing that explores emotional resistances born of history, images, and experiences of vulnerability [is] a deeply personal, embodied experience. . .” (p. 353). Students did persist, despite many of them having no previous experience of storytelling in an academic setting. This persistence spoke to their commitment to holding vulnerability as a central experience to the creation and sharing of their stories; the sharing became a tender dialectic (Gingras, 2008) that had not been part of their postsecondary learning experience previously.
Vulnerability and Hermeneutics
In recursive fashion, as one seeks to know the other, one comes to know herself. This elegant move marks one as vulnerable, and this is the primary finding of the current autoethnographic inquiry: Both students and I were made vulnerable in the act of writing and sharing our autoethnographies. Butler (1997) theorizes that our “existence is always conferred from elsewhere; it marks a primary vulnerability to the Other to be” (p. 21). I contend that the vulnerability in writing and sharing must not be overlooked in this process, since it lends credence to claims that autoethnographic writing strengthen our ability to be with the Other and with ourselves, and that this beingness is necessary for lasting social change—a change made possible only through vulnerability.
My own experience of vulnerability commenced as the course was about to begin. As I was preparing to offer my autoethnography to the students, I became acutely aware of my growing reluctance to do so. When I had been writing the text initially, about 3 years earlier, I had been eager to have it read by as many people as possible but at that time my prospective readership had been small; it had consisted of my coparticipants, my dissertation committee, and the examiners. Now, in the intimate yet public space of the classroom, my eagerness to share my work evaporated. I became tentative and cautious. I wondered if I would be revealing too much of my life to these students whom I did not yet know. What would be the consequences of my taking that risk?
I had come to understand that sharing this work with students would be a political act, since it could afford them permission to share their stories and perhaps shape the kind of professionals they would became. I knew that, despite my reluctance, I would have to demonstrate my trust in them and take that risk if any of this were to unfold. I entered the class on that first day, took a deep breath, and waited to see what would happen.
Hermeneutics as the study of interpretation is a philosophical tradition that has something to say about my autoethnographic process and engaging students in the interpretation and creation of that process. Understanding does not come from only reading the text, but from knowing the author and acknowledging the historical constraints placed on that text as it was being written. As one comes to be known as “author,” one might also be susceptible to feelings of vulnerability. So, it is my claim that when autoethnography is engaged pedagogically, a vulnerability is provoked through the hermeneutic circle of coming to make meaning of one’s life. This vulnerability, as awkward as it might be, is likely a foundational experience of social change, since to be vulnerable is to open to the possibility of being known more intimately, and to become known offers a possibility for self-compassion, self-recognition, and—ideally—transformation. And, as mentioned earlier, these are likely predicates for positive social change of which I believe accentuate all of my pedagogical encounters. I can think of no other reason to be.
Such is the hermeneutics of vulnerability. As I came to interpret my own life, I could not offer meaning to that life without trying to understand the context in which it was lived. I used language to share that meaning with others. As I then invited others to interpret my life, they required an understanding of who they were as interpreters, what lens they brought to the process of meaning making, and what degree of interpretation language made possible.
When one offers something of herself, her story for instance, there is an expectation, a hope that it will be received with care. This reveals the delicate interdependence between trust and vulnerability, both of which, I believe, are necessary for the work of the dietitian to proceed in a meaningful and ethical way (Gingras, 2005b). Given the contemporary context in which one offers her story (a society rife with depictions of violence, social isolation, depression, and disconnections), this exchange is not always mutually beneficial. One is made vulnerable and one can be deeply wounded in that vulnerability.
Of course, the etymology of vulnerability arises from the Latin vulnerare, which means “to wound.” Sharing is a high-risk endeavour, but when one is able to share her story and have it received in a caring way, one is made visible in the sharing; one’s vulnerability gives way to strength, and trust deepens. In a relational context, this encounter is the site of healing and growth, the opportunity for personal and social transformation (Miller & Stiver, 1997). This is the backdrop against which I invited students to share their stories with me, with each other, and, for some, with a larger academic community.
Widening the Circle
Near the end of the teaching term that I have described, an opportunity arose to share my experiences of this course with colleagues at a national teaching and learning conference hosted by my university. Initially, I had submitted an abstract to present on my own, but I decided to invite students to share their perspectives on the course in order to enrich the presentation. Four students accepted my invitation to copresent.
We decided to take turns sharing excerpts from our autoethnographies. We revised the conference abstract to indicate that the purpose of the session was to examine the pedagogical alterity of autoethnography as an approach offering the possibility that colearners’ stories are capable of enhancing and disrupting traditional notions of what counts as knowledge and knowing in higher education. We met prior to the conference session and discussed what we would each share, what was considered suitable, and what we would be able to share given the brief amount of time we had and our desire to provide an adequate context. I recall the students asking me, “Why would anyone want to hear my story?” I shared with them that I had had similar feelings at the start of the term. I had become shy with my story. I explained that, over the weeks, their responses to it had helped to lessen that shyness and reminded me that, in the words of Thomas King (2003), “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (p. 2). This seemed to ease our anxiety somewhat. Inspired by his words, we decided to end each of our passages with his quote as a repeating refrain.
We had a very large group of attendees at our session. We eventually ran out of chairs for everyone and as people continued to join us, they found places to stand at the back, against the wall. And Evyn, my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, was also there taking in her first academic conference; pretending to play with a little pony, while stealing glimpses of me, the students, and the audience. The session was entitled “The Disruptive Capacity of Students Telling (Their) Stories.” One of the students launched the session with an introduction and then, one after another, we shared our autoethnographic writing. We asked the audience, as witnesses to our stories, to offer their felt sense of the trustworthiness of storytelling and autoethnographic fiction as a pedagogical orientation.
After our sharing, we enjoyed a warm round of applause from the audience and then fielded questions—many of which were directed to me. “How did you get away with teaching this course in nutrition?” audience members wanted to know. “Do your colleagues know what you are doing?” Each question was posed with genuine curiosity. We attempted to respond likewise. I became acutely aware that what we were doing was regarded as political and transgressive. Because of the questions asked, I began to feel vulnerable yet again, but I was not alone this time. We were telling our stories together.
Unfinalized Through Autoethnography
Dietetic practice is based on a traditional approach to understanding the nutritional health of others in such a way that the social context of health-seeking behavior is often neglected by the practitioner, at great cost to the “client” (Aphramor, 2005). As Austin (1999) notes, “Nutritional public health has demonstrated little understanding of anything outside of traditional materialist ideology” (p. 246), resulting in a systematically overdefined foundation for the profession, one that crucially maintains “nutritional science’s incognizance of its relationship to experiences of eating, dieting, and body image” (p. 246). Based on these assertions, it is crucial for educators to engage dietetic students in ways that elaborate on the social and cultural contexts of their professional work.
Autoethnographic fiction is one way to connect with and to deepen knowledge of self and others in a social/cultural context (Razack, 1993). As Ellis and Bochner (2000) claim, “We need a form that will allow readers to feel the moral dilemmas, think with our story instead of about it, join actively in the decision points that define an autoethnographic project, and consider how their own lives can be made a story worth telling” (p. 735). This is what I asked of myself and then of students in an effort for us to learn of ourselves and others. This is the rich possibility of autoethnographic fiction.
Being made vulnerable by my autoethnographic choices allowed me to experience a transformation as a person, as an educator, and as a learner—subjectivities that are rendered inseparable and mutually constituting by poststructuralism. I came to know that my vulnerability rendered me unfinalized as a person, reminding me that while striving to understand the unity of life, I must never forget the very particular dimensions of difference among people. This reminder was more than theoretical. I felt it in my being, I lived this knowing in my contradictions, and in my embracing of the work we all need to do to enact social change.
Frank (2005) reminds us that to engage in dialogical research, of which I believe autoethnographic inquiry is an example, we are called to see the world as unfinalized. It is an ethical imperative not to judge or claim as certain what we see around us, that which is visible through our “ethnographic I” (Ellis, 2004). The autoethnographic text is “one move in a continuing dialogue through which those participants will continue to form themselves, as they continue to become who they may not yet be” (Frank, 2005, p. 967).
In writing autoethnographically and then sharing that with students, I have been transformed. I have moved through the experiences of vulnerability around my own writing to create a space where students could “continue to become who they may not yet be” (Frank, 2005, p. 967). In addition, I found delight and release in being able to engage my autoethnographic impulse during our in-class writing activities. Autoethnography remains an essential method of meaning making, a way to come to terms with my current choices and dilemmas, and to speak that truth to power.
Invariably, the meaning of stories entangled in a rhizovocal autoethnographic fiction is dependent on “perpetual generation”; “one story calls forth another” and the present story holds the potential for continual “revision and redistribution in future stories” (Frank, 2005, p. 967). This was true for me in the experience of this course; my story called out for another, including another of my own along with many others from students. Autoethnographic fiction resists a last word and openly participates—or, perhaps more accurately, openly instigates an ongoing reconstitution of discourse. Mercifully, there is a widening circle in our dietetic community who have shared their stories and are awaiting others with a warm embrace; a gesture of profound transformative potential. It changes everything.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mary M. Walters for her editorial support in moving this article forward through my own vulnerability and/or resistance. As importantly, I wish to extend my generous gratitude to all the students who have bravely expressed their vulnerability each time this course was offered (five times as of this publication) and shared their stories anyway as a profound political act of transformative potential.
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.