Personal Narrative as Political Praxis...

Dear Performance Studies,

This might be a silly way to start out my concluding remarks about my Performance Ethnography class, however, after many attempts at trying to write about it, this is the only way that makes sense in my brain, my hands, my heart. First of all I would like to thank you. You have done a lot for me in a short amount of time. I'm not exactly sure what I would have done without you, especially in the field of Human Communication Studies.

But I must regress because I feel like you need a little background, a little personal narrative, something that can maybe help you understand where I have been and where I am going, and how I need you to be in my life in order to do the kind of work I want to do. Langellier's () idea of using personal narrative as political praxis to illustrate that personal stories matter in terms of self-definition especially juxtaposed with what Corey () terms the master narrative that conveys ideology of the dominant discourse. Corey tells us that these stories need to be told in order to empower the teller, but also in order to evoke something in the reader or listener and possibly even implicate them into the story. This calls writers/tellers, and listeners/hearers to be accountable for their participation in perpetuating ideologies of domination and asks them to disrupt these normative ideas in some way. This is my story that needs to be told about why I need performance studies in my life in order for me to do the kind of work I want to do.

When I first started the Human Communication program at DU I was extremely nervous. I didn't know how or where I would fit into the space. My background was always in cultural studies and specifically in women's and gender studies and I didn't know if there was room for a person with such progressive and at times radical politics in a discipline like communication studies. During the opening orientation process I was excited to see students interested in queer theory and interesting cultural communication topics, some of the professors seemed to be doing interesting and valuable work but I just didn't know how I would transition.

I'm not a huge fan of "women's studies" in the way it is normally conceived as it tends to place gender and woman at the center of a matrix or the top of an ill-conceived hierarchy as though that is the most important part of a person's identity. I found this to be problematic because I don't feel that gender above race, class, gender or sexuality is more important to understanding one's experiences in the world. I instead believe all identities inform other aspects of identities although they do not always hold the same weight at every moment in someone's life. I believe in a process of intersectional analysis and find that this is most helpful when trying to understand someone's experiences.

I was also resentful of women's studies especially at the graduate level because all of the great things I had learned about activism and giving voice to the voiceless, consciousness raising, and queering were all left behind at the door to the academy I was becoming a part of. Instead everything was replaced with theory especially that of dead white guys. Derrida, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, "the great theorists of the world." I was confused what these guys were saying and why I needed to know it in terms of feminist theory-it just wasn't what I expected. I see now that this did prepare me and provide me with some background theory knowledge that is helpful and useful and if nothing else helpful in that it taught me to "learn to read [theory] better" But I was distraught that all of my passion and dedication to justice and liberation was being eaten away at by theory, and that I was beginning to lose my sense of purpose.

When I first began my course work in communication studies which was not so long ago, I began to see that I was in a minority of people who considered themselves to be feminists, and who had actually read works by feminist and queer scholars. This is not so much a judgment on the other students in my class as much as it is an observation of the differences in our interests and educational backgrounds. I also think I may be the only actual gay person who came in with this specific class, at least I am the only one who has ever talked about it. Instead I am generally in contact with people who are married and have children, or folks with heterosexual boyfriends and girlfriends. I felt sort of alone. Not that it was better where I was before, as I have come to realize that just because people are feminists does not mean they have the same common goals, interests, or personalities. They are just as different as any other group of people. It had been awhile since I had found a place where I felt like I fit.

I was also going through one of the most hellacious times of my life because my female partner of three years and I were going through what can only be described as a divorce. She and I were no longer just girlfriends but we were intimately a part of each other's lives and she had become like a part of my family. I know people have gone through divorces in our cohort, but when societally your love is not really recognized as significant in the first place, it is hard to explain to people what you are going through when significant queer relationships end. I wrote one of my Qualitative Methods One papers about this trying time in my life and my inability to focus on anything else. While I received a certain amount of sympathy I definitely got the impression that I should not write about this again, so I didn't.

I was supposed to write autoethnographic sections about my experience at the preschool, my joys, humors, and frustrations-that is what would be really interesting. But I was frustrated because no one at work knew what I was going through, so I suffered through it alone. The kids became somewhat my release, their unconditional love giving me the strength to keep going, to keep coming into work everyday. There shiny, smily, happy faces made me feel joy I wasn't feeling from many other places and I felt in debt to them for giving me something to do everyday to forget about the pain I was going through. Children respond much better to happiness and joy, than saddness and depression. These were my emotions in the site, not that I was really shocked by the fact that the boys didn't want to eat off a pink and purple place mat. When I would share my progress reports in class about my site I often had to fend off tears and having to excuse and collect myself.

I was also going through a major life shift. I had moved back home after being away for five years because my great-grandmother who had raised me had become extremely ill. I thought I would be coming home to attend her funeral, but the few times I had made the journey from the Midwest home, she never died. I would enter her hospital room and immediately burst out into tears. This was my great grandmother but in many ways she was my mother or at least a mother. She looked so small and frail lying in this medical bed with the adjustable head and foot. My mother who was also raised by my great grandmother began massaging her muscles with a strong menthol scented lotion because of her constant pain. We wanted to get her blood flowing through her body and so we rubbed. In my mind I remembered learning about healing touch in an embodiment movement class from college, I imagine planets circulating around each other and her organs become a solar system that is just a bit stagnant. Her body is not able to go through it's normal rotation on its own any longer, we are there to help with the flow. The next day the hospital found she was ok to go home, and I have always thought it was because of the work of my mother and myself that saved her that time. Although she continues to have issues with her inner ear and often becomes dizzy and in turn has fallen, her heart and lungs continue to be strong. They continue to pump and move involuntarily, despite the fact that she often talks about wanting to die.

Moving home meant moving to the mountains in order to save money by living with my parents. My great-grandmother also lives with us as does my thirteen year old adopted Latina sister. My mother also takes care of my brother's children between three and five days/nights per week. In any given time we have 8 people in our house ranging from one to 93 years old with all ages in between. We are far from a typical nuclear family structure and we are most definitely dysfunctional but I began to settle into living in a new place, settle into my new job. I felt myself getting healthier and stronger and falling in love with living so close to a natural space. I had been so far removed from the land for so long, being next to a clear flowing river had the tendency to lift my spirits. Needless to say my living situation also worked makes it challenging for me to be connected to the place where I am trying to achieve scholastically. I do not have the same stake in the University that others have or that I might wish to have some day. When I would drive down the mountain canyon for class I rarely felt connected to a lot of the material I was reading let alone the people I was in classes with. I wanted to write about my life, my family, my new friends I was making, mountain culture, and bluegrass but I didn't feel that there was room for my stories in "True" scholarly work.

People in my cohort, critical scholars doing work on performance and performativity, race, class, gender and sexuality told me to wait it out that it would get better that I would take classes more oriented toward culture and that I would feel more satisfied. When I started my second quarter classes and had Performance Ethnography, within the first couple of days reading Conquergood I realized that there was something different in this idea of performance studies. It seemed to incorporate feminism, queer theory, personal narrative, commitment to self and other, all adding to the emphasis on social justice work created by performing this type of scholarship.

I fianlly found a place where it was ok to be personal, to talk about my narratives and my life. This class gave me the freedom to explore my own connections to dominant ideologies and my own implication in them. The journal especially gave me a chance to not only make the theoretical connections with my life stories but also gave me the chance to write my own stories through autobiographical performative writing, which Gingrich-Philbrook believes has always connected private life to political sectors. I was finally able to engage in dialog with myself, to really reflect on my own otherness and yet be reflexive in this thought process that I am not always other, but that I am privileged in certain situations and marginalized in others and often times both simultaneously. As Conquergood (1985) writes, "Dialogical performance is a way of having intimate conversations with other people and cultures. Instead of speaking about them, one speaks to and with them…"(178). I felt like this class helped me to know myself better so that I can engage in dialogic performances with others and be more reflexive and accountable.

Although we read no queer female performance scholars' work I felt myself able to connect with those people who wrote about the differences they experience on a daily basis. Fox, Alexander, Calafell, Cory, all used personal experiences with racism, homophobia/heterosexism, classism, and sexism to inform their work and I felt connected to their work because of the dialog around difference created and performed in their pieces. I also feel that queer female voices are needed in this field of study and I look forward to hopefully making some sort of contribution to this type of scholarship by adding my voice to the body of literature in performance studies. In many ways I cannot see myself doing any other sort of work because I don't think I could do the kind of work I want to do in talking about domination, oppression, marginalization, and social justice without engaging in work that has a history of being committed to talking about these things. I feel that this is the only way I can be sane and still do scholarly work and so I am excited to continue learning and growing in this line of inquiry.