Autoethnography

Beyond the gender binary through writing lives

Adam, Wiesner

Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU

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http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/Article.aspx?ID=0350-08611802335W

2018-2020/03/24/16:33:16

The goal of this contribution is to present autoethnography as a research method which provides an ethnographer with the possibility of combining an essential mix of themes in order to carefully describe the researcher’s personal experience. Despite being at the margins of the regular qualitative method of inquiry, autoethnography has a long history in ethnographic research. One of the main advantages of using such a method of inquiry as an important research tool is the high potential of autoethnography to uncover the process of ethnographer’s mind in the middle of reflexive analytical process. The author focuses on the potential of the use of autoethnography in engaged and applied research, e.g. in case of social justice related topics. The contribution draws from the author’s personal experience from the field of using autoethnography as both the method and a genre when describing the process of gender transition from the non-binary perspective. The author argues that the often “rejected” subjectivity and emotionality of ethnographic narratives have a great potential to uncover, with the proper use of the ethnographer´s reflexivity, the important aspects of the analytical process of the construction of anthropological knowledge.

autoethnography, gender binary, non-binary, transgender, writing as a method