Performing Confession: Toward a Critical Reflexive Scholarship

by John T. Warren

More to the point, what kind of carnival is it if it doesn't stir up the town fathers enough to call out the cops? It isn't a carnival at all, its just a church fair. (Gray np)

The word "counts" catches her attention; she smiles. She remembers endorsing another title when the session was organized . . . a title that presumed rather than questioned the legitimacy of performance and autoethnography. She wonders why policing has gained priority over educating. (Ellis np)

On Feeling Attacked: Scholarship Defined on the Bodies of Scholars

I first encountered "Sextext" at a performance studies conference where I saw the authors perform the piece before an audience of some 15 to 20 audience members. I remember being intrigued with the piece, but more interested in another work offered during the same session. After the completion of the panel, I went up to the author of the piece I found most interesting and discussed some of the points in her project that I found similar to my own work. I did not respond to the "Sextext" performance, although I did overhear one person ask how they could write something like "Sextext." An author replied, "We have tenure." I went home from the conference and did not think anything more about it until the January issue of TPQ arrived at my home. Upon opening the issue, I found the article by Corey and Nakayama. I revisited the article, noting the fascinating way the authors critiqued the use of academic language in discussions of desire. I put the issue on my shelf, unaware of the debate that would ensue. While "Sextext" never applied directly to my research interests, I never questioned the validity or legitimacy of its placement in TPQ.

As someone who finds autoethnographic and autobiographic scholarship vital to the field of performance studies, I find myself in an interesting place within the "Sextext" discussion. While my performance work and scholarship is not "pornographic," as critics like Ted Wendt claim about "Sextext," my work dwells explicitly in the personal. I write, like Pelias in the infamous TPQ issue, what I call confessional pieces written through performative writing which aim to offer comment/critique within both the personal and academic worlds. I hear the negative comments against this "cosmetic" form of scholarship (see Parks) and feel the impact against my body. But this attack is not one of ideas but form--I am to blame not because of the arguments, the content, nor the claims I make, but rather because of the way those arguments are made. Because it is located in the personal and because it takes a form that most scholarship does not, my work does not make the grade.

Malcolm Parks, and others like him, want to claim that what falls within these works are just personal narratives which "are not scholarship, but rather, at best, data upon which scholarship can be built" (np). Because I aim to construct scholarship differently, my work fails to count and serves as "simple personal description" (Parks np) The critics reduction of this work fails to engage with my academic claims, nor the quality of my scholarship, but rather conflates of rigorous academic and aesthetic work to everyday storytelling. The question these critics ask is not about the scholarship, but about whether I am a scholar. If criticizing the work that depends on personal narrative risks politeness, then criticizing their existence definitely functions as a direct attack on the bodies who construct them. As an autobiographical and autoethnographic scholar, I am not insulted with criticism of my work, but rather insulted by those who long to deny me the ability to speak in the first place. To place criticism at the level of legitimacy, rather than considering what this kind of work gives us, serves to deny particular voices in the scholarly community, making the academy a location where one must speak one particular language to the exclusion of others. Silence, it seems to me, is always more hurtful than honest critical engagement. I also find it interesting that critics assume that one language--one kind of talk--can respond to all the differing questions before scholars today. Like Ellis, I am curious about why questions of what 'counts' and what doesn't--who 'counts' and who doesn't--are where some scholars spend their critical time.

Of Sinners and Their Tales: A Case for Confessional Scholarship

In a recent article Barry Kanpol offers a way to think about coming to terms with and taking responsibility for how privilege is experienced and used by people in everyday life. He calls for a space that serves as a:

necessary step [. . .] to create the practical possibility for what I will call here confession. A necessary pre-condition to the preparation of present and future teachers for attempting anything 'critical' in their classrooms is the use of confession as a pedagogical tool. (64)

While Kanpol is not necessarily clear in what happens after these confessions, he clearly states why these moments of self evaluation are important. He notes that confession "prepares teachers to be agents of enlightening and liberating change, not only for themselves, but for their students as well" (74). While I am intrigued by the idea of confession, I am also curious about how such a technique may do more harm than good. For instance, if I confess and have a moment of clarity, can I then refuse accountability for racism, sexism, and classism? Kanpol is unclear here, but in the spirit of his work, I think we can make conclusions about how we might see confession not as an single experience, but rather a process of constant self-reflexivity that continues to attack systems of oppression and privilege. True confession, it seems, calls for social change on the level of the individual and those systems in which the individual is embedded.

To really understand the implications of using a term like confession, one must account for the multiple meanings the term brings to mind. One usage of confession connotes the religious act of confession, where the sinner confesses in order to be resolved of those sins by God through the act of voicing their digressions. This usage of confessions is problematic not only because of the reliance of a higher power somehow granting absolution, but also because somehow the act of confessing provides forgiveness--the sinner no longer needs to concern him/herself with the issue once they agree to stop doing the sinful activity. When translating this to institutional forms of oppression (racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, etc...), the elimination of specific acts fails to account for the minute and insidious nature of these systems of power. However, what this connotation gives us that is useful is the notion out of Christianity, and other religions, that we are all sinners in need of reflecting and admitting to one's sins. This is to say that when Foucault defines power as both enacted through everyone but by no one in particular, he is noting how we are all involved in systems of power that contribute to the stability of oppressive systems. By undergoing a process of confession, one examines one's own placement within that system. The extensive analysis of the system might just allow one to uncover the "limits of thinkability," which are the limits in thinking that make it impossible to search out possibilities for social change (Britzman).

Another connotation of confession arises from police confessions, where the criminal admits to a crime--s/he turns her/himself over to the authority for punishment. Surely I am not advocating a process of confession where the confessor gets hauled off to jail, but rather I find appealing the idea of owning up; of admitting that one participates in systems that serve to hurt others. This kind of confession is not necessarily an admission of wrong doing (in that intentional sense of the word), but rather an admission that one participates in systems that inadvertently does wrongs to others. Finally, I also want to invoke the sense of confession that is used in everyday life, where one simply informs another to information that was unknown by the other: "I confess I forgot the bread at the store." This everyday usage functions as a telling of information, large or small, that might then lead to resolution. I understand resolution, as in social action, to drive Kanpol's work, in that I think he uses confessions as a way to move toward a more equitable social world.

While the case that confession is good for the soul might be common place, I argue that we move past the notion that one should engage in a reflexive critical thought and move toward confession as a legitimate and critical form of scholarship. While some scholars question performance (and other modes of scholarship) that find a basis in epistemologies of the personal, I want to suggest that it is precisely this kind of work that provides the opportunity for effective social commentary and action. Scholarship based in the personal provides a response to questions that can only be answered through self-reflection. The desire to conduct performative writing as a way of doing this scholarship is based in the desire to craft words in such a way as to more fully articulate that kind of knowing (see Goodall, Pelias "Performative"). The charges and critiques of autoethnographic and autobiographic scholarship will be addressed in chapter three, where I take the criticisms of this work as a primary subject.

To make the case for the benefit of this kind of work, I will examine three pieces of scholarship that takes confession, either explicitly or implicitly, as its primary form of scholarly representation. The three pieces of work I will examine are Ronald J. Pelias's "Confessions of an Apprehensive Performer," Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege and Male Privilege," and my own performance piece "Confessions of a Male Feminist Teacher," each of which explore how the self provides a location for both a personal as well as institutional exploration of systems of power.

In Pelias' self-labeled confession, he draws on the personal to make a very political point about scholarship dealing, analyzing, and theorizing communication apprehension ("Confessions"). Communication apprehension, as it is almost always discussed in the research, appears to be a completely disembodied problem that makes people 'reticent,' 'reluctant,' 'apprehensive,' or even 'anxious' when speaking in public. While the point of this research trend is to find ways of understanding who suffers from this kind of fear and how one might accommodate or account for it, the research continually translates this bodily experience into quantitative data--a number on a scale. This type of research, while valuable in terms of the kind of questions and kind of responses it is capable of, serves as the site of Pelias' critique. Through "personal narrative style," Pelias creates multiple narratives based in the self that allows one to experience what the lived body experiences when it encounters a public performance. The confession, while not about this scholar as an oppressor, clearly attempts to uncover the hidden components of a system of research that fails to account for embodied theories and then attempts to articulate what communication apprehension feels like. Pelias, through his confession of fear--of stomach aching, breath taking, knee knocking terror, provides commentary about how research that deals with these kinds of anxieties might be complicated to provide a more comprehensive accounting for this commonly articulated and highly researched phenomena. With this essay, readers can experience an essay that speaks to their bodily felt knowledge about communication apprehension as well as see how the research system may not be addressing those concerns.

Similarly, Peggy McIntosh, in her ground breaking essay on whiteness, discusses coming to see correspondences between male and white privilege, articulating from personal experience a complicated understanding of how systems of power work on and through people. I see her desire in the essay as an urge to understand unearned privilege as a corollary aspect of domination and to focus attention on issues of systemic oppression as different from individualized actions (1-3). This is not necessarily new, but it is how she gets to this argument that has made this essay a cornerstone of cultural studies research. In a "list of special circumstances and conditions," McIntosh details 46 individual privileges that she personally experiences on a daily basis simply because her skin appears white (5). McIntosh does not name her piece a confession, but through the use of a personal accounting of her place within a system of dominance she, in effect, confesses to having and to using privilege. In her essay, she does not confess that she intentionally inflicts wrong onto others, but rather accounts for the fact that the system creates the conditions for the possibility of these kinds of inequalities. Further, she argues that within that system, she participates in the wrong doing of others (as do we by association). For instance, McIntosh writes: "When I am told about our national heritage or about 'civilization,' I am shown that people of my color made it what it is" (6). Here, McIntosh confesses that both personal and institutional gains are made because of the color of her skin. She demonstrates how she benefits through a system that makes these kinds of inequalities possible. The confession works to not only allow McIntosh room for self-reflexivity, but to critique the social system that makes those privileges possible. In that move, the reader must take into account his/her own place in a system of power and, in doing that, this piece of scholarship becomes heuristic--opening space for multiple people to reflect on their own position.

In my own work, I have chosen to work in the genre of confession twice ("Confessions," "Passing"). In both of those performative essays, I discuss my own placement in systems of power and how privilege helps construct who I am in the world. In "Confessions," I examine the crossroads of several intersecting tensions where I feel pulled toward social action while also feeling the desire and pleasure of privilege:

I am a confessor. But, this confession carries more than just self reflection, but also the hope that through such writing I become able to act. I do want to confess that I use privilege in my classroom. I know that the students will read my body as a site of authority, simply because I am male. I know they will do this in ways I can not always foresee nor predict--yet sometimes rely and count upon. I know they would treat me differently, however subtly or overtly, if I were a woman. I know I benefit from privilege that extend well beyond my role as teacher. But what do I do about it? How do I resist authority? How, when I am suspect already because of my youthful age, my academic position, my inexperience, do I resist the pleasure of a little authority? I feel this struggle, and countless others, within my body--the sensation is visceral. I enjoy the comfort of privilege as I walk through the classroom, as I meet folks in my office, as the room quiets as I enter, and every time the grade I have given to a student goes unquestioned and accepted. I feel the comfort in my body when I enter the classroom without ever feeling--ever thinking about-- the threat of sexual harassment or sexual assault, even if I am not always safe. I, for the most part, feel comfort in the classroom. And that comfort feels good. But, I also feel the conflict of my values and that pleasure. I feel the tension between the privilege of being a man and the feminist ideology I have adopted. I feel that tension as my body is pulled from one feeling to another. I want to combat the system that gives me privilege and oppresses others, but I also want the comfort I have come to expect and count upon. I want to fight unearned, socially granted, privilege while promoting feminist values. But, as I live my daily life, I know I consciously and unconsciously resist losing that pleasure born of power. I want to be a male feminist teacher. I believe that I can be this kind of teacher. I believe that occasionally I am that kind of teacher, but I am unsure how negotiate the "unearned" privilege that is claimed by, attributed to, placed upon, enjoyed by me because of my body's seemingly apparent biological identity. How does one negotiate this painful three lane intersection that calls upon the body to do so many things at once? How do I do feminist teaching when I am a man who enjoys and takes pleasure in such extensive privilege? How does anyone enact resistance to something so seductive, multi-layered, complex, and invisible that s/he may not even be aware s/he are enjoying it, using it, or depending upon it? Where is my site of resistance? My site of resistance begins here. I must transform the comfort and pleasure that lies within privilege toward a resistance that allows me to use that privilege of power, voice, position, and status to upset and undermine the status quo and work toward progressive societal change. The power of privilege does not always have to reinscribe; it can, if used responsibly, lead the way toward a more equitable and just social world.

The confession, as I tried to envision it, used the personal to articulate the struggle between privilege and social action. The use of the personal allowed the confession to be my own, yet I attempted to go beyond my own specific struggle and offer commentary on why undermining systems of power remain so difficult. If I am dedicated, or claim to be dedicated, to alleviating oppression, how do I avoid the seduction of power and pleasure that is privilege? I offer a personal lens to demonstrate how these systems of power remain dominant. I intended to provide space, through my narrative, for others to self reflect about their own position in this struggle. While an argument could have been made through a more traditional format, the confessional autoethnographic format allowed me to answer questions that only self-exploration would have made possible (see Goodall).

Confessional performance and confessional writing, if done well, should begin in the personal, providing an opportunity for the telling and sharing of the complexities of human life (Pelias, "Performative" 7). The personal allows for moments of self-reflection born out of hearing or bearing witness to another's life struggles, which introduces one "to individuals with whose social lives and ideas he [or she] might not identify at all, but whose personal testimony nonetheless manages somehow to draw him [or her] inward" toward self-reflexivity (Bawer 216). Further, a confession, if well constructed, should reflect how the personal is political: "good autoethnography always speaks beyond itself" (Ellis np). Confessions should always be about more than the act of telling the story, but also about what this narrative tells others that then allows for an argument to be made that goes beyond the specific site of that particular narrative. Like any piece of scholarship, the confession must speak outside itself to a larger community.

Confessional writing/performance, and other autoethnographic work, should blur the lines between art and scholarship. In the efforts to separate out scholarship from other kinds of talk and other kinds of meaning making, I see an effort to create borders between artistic and scholarly modes of representation. This border seems to argue that art serves one function while scholarship aims toward other ends. I find the separation faulty for several reasons, but most significantly because it starts from a base that says those communities don't have anything to say to each other. The making, and guarding, of the lines between these efforts suggest that since they speak differently, their conversations should remain distinct. Ultimately, the desire to distinguish and sharply define art and scholarship only serves to create boundaries and lines that are impossible to fully police. As Trinh T. Minh-ha stated long before I, anyone's desire to create stable categories functions to assemble a coherent illusion of continuity--a logical rationale (27). Yet despite one's efforts to separate art and scholarship, those categories will certainly leak into each other. And further, the distinction creates hierarchies that relegates particular projects in or out of the scholarly discourse.

Finally, good confessional performance/written scholarship should create spaces for controversy (Goodall 8). It should raise questions, stir up conversation, anger and scare some, please and excite others. As Paul Gray argued in regards to the "Sextext" debate, the problem isn't the subject, but rather how that subject gets discussed (np). When the fear is that confessional and other autoethnographic work is too personal or too creative, I always wonder about for whom should scholars write and what function scholarship should serve. If our scholarship doesn't resonate with out lived experiences, then why do it? And if a story doesn't open our mind to both the personal and the institutional systems, then is the question really about whether it is scholarship or not? Or is the question about whether it is good scholarship? These are very different questions.

It was four o'clock on a Friday. I remember because I was surprised to get home after a busy day and discover the one message on the machine was a my mother. Her voice on the machine seemed stressed, as if she was going to drop some bad news. I am always aware of this voice, this tired and strained voice that draws me back to the death of my aunt--John, Aunt Pat has cancer. It's bad. . . . This is the voice calling to tell me about my grandmother--she is not well. She lives, as if that has much meaning now, in Tennessee about ten minutes from my Aunt Sharon's home. Several times a week, Sharon makes that ten minute trip to visit my grandmother in the nursing home, trying to make it seem more like home. My grandmother is almost completely overtaken by the Alzheimer's now--she has no memory of my grandfather who died of cancer eleven years ago, the home they build together when they moved to Michigan, nor the members of my family who now struggle to remember who she was before she became who she has become. So it is the voice of death I hear on the phone and I think of my grandmother who, I suspect has joined my grandfather not on Paw Paw Avenue but in Memorial Garden's. My heart has prepared for this call, but I am unsure of how to feel. I pick up the phone and call home, already beginning to imagine how I can arrange to get to Michigan for the funeral.

"Hello?" my mother's voice is tired, but it has lost some of the sorrow that coded the message, still blinking on the machine.

"Hi, Mom. What's up." I ask.

"John, I'm glad you called. There's something I need to tell you. We knew it would happen, although we hoped it would wouldn't." Her voice is shaking a bit, but I am confused. In my mind I have had this conversation--the death call--with my Mother countless times and this does not sound like I suspected it would. "It's gone. Grandpa's house. Bea called and it's gone. Bulldozed. His house. And they did it on his birthday."

For a second I am relieved. My grandmother, although still in the gray fog that causes her so much anguish, is still there. We still have her material body to hug and her physical hand to touch. I am relieved as I listen to my mother fight the tears. She is fighting the tears I know she has already spent. Crying for the house my grandfather built with his own hands. Crying for the barn that once held his tools, his tractor, his work bench. Crying for the home she grew up in and home my brothers and I trekked to every holiday for large family gatherings. Crying for my grandfather's bathroom, pea green with ivory tile, a standing shower, and undecorated sink and toilet. Crying for what was his, but hasn't been for over a decade. Crying for what was sold, rented, scavenged, and bulldozed. Crying for the now lack of physicality that allowed her to glance and remember. She is crying.

And while she is crying but not, I begin to understand the impact of what has happened. It's gone. That place so vivid in my memory is gone. I remember the Old Spice smell of his bathroom. I remember the feel of the white sand between my toes as I walked through the back yard where the peach trees grew. I remember the mustard carpet in the living room that made a squeak sound when I walk on it. I remember the taste of Pepsi from the bottles my grandmother would buy as I sat in front of the television on the back porch. I remember my grandfather sleeping in his favorite olive green chair, his false teeth hanging precariously from his mouth as he snores peacefully. Yes, I remember this place and begin understand the loss of my grandfather's house eleven years after his death. And I confess that I am sad, angry, and empty at the thought of that place no longer standing where it stood so long.

Yes, I understand the reason for its destruction. Whirlpool, the large corporation that has its headquarters on the same block with dreams of owning and expanding to cover the vast land surrounding their corporate offices, has included my grandfather's house in the destruction of five other houses. The houses are just material to them that stands in the way, but to my mother--my family--these houses represent families, histories, and embody those people who owned them. The bathroom, living room, kitchen, front step, the door with the Grear "G," and the floor with the squeaky carpet is just stuff reduced to trash to be carried away making way for new material that will be erected in its place. And knowing this, I am sad, angry and empty. This material, now absent, creates an absence in me that I find hard to pretend is just stuff. But I know it is just stuff. Just wood, paint, cement, carpet, porcelain, and tile. But I know I hold on to those materialistic bits like I am holding on to the person. Like if I can keep that house, that stuff, I can keep something of the man who created it.

But this is fantasy. Yes, that stuff has meaning, but only because I allow it to. I allow stuff to run and function as my memory of those experiences and people who are apart of the past. I take photos, protecting them in frames and mounting them on the refrigerator and on my walls. I display the pen--the one that fell out of my grandfather's pocket the day he died--on my bookshelf next to his photo. I keep the gown from my undergraduate graduation in a zip lock bag in the basement. I place toys, books, and other items on my desk at work that contain stories and memories. I do this because I depend on those things. For some reason the time, the people, and the experiences I enjoyed need some supplementation to make their existence memorable. I confess that I need these things because I have been so convinced by the desire to have things--those materialistic symbols--that I have lost the ability to remember without them. I so clearly buy into the logic of this materialistic sense of things that I lack the ability to know--to remember--without them.

"Its all gone," my mother says after a long silence.

"No, as long as we remember it will always be there."

"Yes, I suppose you are right," she replies. I suspect neither of really believe it though. After all, it is gone.

This section of the essay is my attempt to make sense of the criticisms levied at the efforts of scholars working in the mode of autobiographical/autoethnographic writing, within which I place confessional performance/writing. Perhaps the most criticized form of autoethnographic scholarship, confession demands the close analysis of the personal and can, if not carefully done, appear to fall into narcissism. But the question before us is this: does the threat of narcissism necessarily mean that this type of work fails to measure up as scholarship. The purpose here is to explicitly lay out some of the criticisms, drawing from Wendt and Parks who have made these concerns most apparent, while also attempting to answer them from a confessional point of view.

Ted Wendt is probably the most notable critic of Corey and Nakayama's "Sextext," a fictional account of gay male pornography where the authors attempt to bring scholarship on pornography to the body where it ultimately questions how research on desire gets represented. Wendt, after offering several responses to the article's publication in Text and Performance Quarterly, presented a paper answering his critics at the 1997 National Communication Association annual meeting, which was subsequently published in the American Communication Journal. In this response, Wendt bases his criticisms in five main categories that sum up his position in relation to "Sextext:" 1) the article is monological and a "self-absorbed, narcissistic, mastubatory aria;" 2) the article's use of fiction suggests a desire that this way of knowing may replace traditional forms of scholarship and thus eliminate the possibility of rational interrogation; 3) the contradictions of the piece (e.g., of the failure to find language while using language) are aesthetically defensible, "but they seem too incoherent as scholarship;" 4) what makes the article a good representation of pornography also demonstrates its "categorical irrelevance as scholarship;" 5) the article ultimately fails to be about performance since it functions as a "self-absorbed introspection" that allows the character to wallow in "the narcissistic pleasure of his masochism" (np). While these are specific to "Sextext," I would posit that they are useful as a summary of much of the scholarship based in the personal--that scholarship that begins with the self and works outward.

Parks in a similar vein cautions against this type of scholarship with these points: scholarship should do more than evoke feelings, should go beyond self justification, should transcend group advocacy, should make appeals beyond personal experience, should utilize theory in non-cosmetic ways, and should admit to reasoned criticism (np). I summarize these concerns not to conflate all criticism to these individuals' opinions, but rather I present these positions to demonstrate the kind of similarity between different critics which I argue are symptomatic of this kind of criticism writ large. I want to respond to four criticism trends, based loosely on Parks and Wendt, in an effort to point out the problematic nature of some of these comments. Keeping in mind Barbara Herrnstein Smith's reminder that all "value is impure; evaluation is contingent" (3), I offer these responses from a particular point of view that is embedded in preserving and making space for this form of scholarship.

Confession is self-absorbed and narcissistic and is not, in and of itself, scholarship . . .

Confessional performance and writing is inherently personal--it is a statement of positionality that attempts to locate oneself within a larger world view. It begins explicitly with the personal--the "I." While this is true, it also attempts to be the "eye" into that world view which can only be accomplished through the personal. Yet critics argue that the personal should never be an ending: "personal narratives are not scholarship, but rather, at best, data upon which scholarship can be built" (Parks np). Parks is both correct, yet a bit short sighted in his criticism of personal narrative. He is correct in his urge for scholarship to do more than give "simple personal description," which is an urge echoed by autoethnographic scholar H. L. Goodall Jr., to name but one: "Just because we claim to have written autoethnography doesn't mean it is good autoethnography. Nor does it mean that all autoethnography is narcissistic" (4). Confessional performance/writing should do more than tell of experience, but rather should make that experience contexualized in larger social concerns. To quote Pelias: "Everyday experience, then, is not scholarship, but the shaping of everyday experience into telling and moving tales can be" ("Performative" 7)

However to assume that personal narrative inherently stops within the self-absorbed relaying of personal experience fails to note how these narratives speak beyond their own experience. Parks asks "what is important about my experience other than the fact that I had it" (np), yet it seems like he fails to understand that the story is only the place of beginning, not the ending. As Goodall notes, "the problem with Narcissus was not that he looked at the reflected image of himself in the water, but that he didn't look long or hard enough at it. Had he done that, his critique would have been more self-reflexive and the lessons learned from it more worthwhile" (4). Confessional performance demands that one start with individual experience and then make that experience speak toward the experience of others (see Bawer). Finally, I am reminded that in every piece of scholarship the author is present, "telling the reader to note this and ignore that" (Gray np), however much scholarship hides the place of the author in an illusion of objectivity.

Confession is impossible to critique because it is so subjective . . .

This is a common criticism of confessional performance. The logic is simple: if it is your personal story, how can we critique it? How do we separate the self from the story? My response to this is also simple: if I offer this as scholarship, I expect it to enter into the rigorous debate in which I have placed it. If I take the criticism of my narrative as an attack against me and my story, then I am to blame for putting it out there in the first place. Langellier and Peterson note that personal narratives have a "political function" (136); they exist in a politicized space, as does any scholarship. What upsets me is not when my ideas and claims are challenged, but when the legitimacy of how I chose to make those claims are denied. I expect the scholarship that derives out of my own personal experience to be contested because that contestation allows for further reflection and discussion for all--experience should never be the stopping point for conversation but rather the beginning of critical interrogation (see Scott).

Moreover, I think this kind of criticism serves as a way of ignoring the more central questions that surround this kind of scholarship which go more to the stability of what we know to be scholarship--a foundational question about where we all stand as scholars and also about what we, as scholars, do and do not do. To frame the issue as an effort to protect scholarly detachment, as if anything I write fails to have a personal investment and it is only when the scholarship stems from my own intimate lived experience that I begin to feel attacked, is an illusion. This kind of argument derives from the fear that what we know to be scholarship--those clear lines in the sand--will break down. However, Pelias notes that even if there are fractures in the academic foundation "it is at most a hairline fracture" ("Performative" 6). The real fear is that when one admits that the hairline is legitimate, one must understand that the foundation upon which scholarship stands is, at best, a limited construction. Admitting this remains a terror with which some are not comfortable.

Confession is not scholarship because it relies on "cosmetic" writing . . .

When Parks, to name but one, fears the mode of scholarship that is "cosmetic" or aesthetic, he falls into the trap of claiming that the combination of performative writing and theory only leads to the "chimera of scholarship." In his ACJ essay, he discusses a "bawdy little poem" performance that he presented at the National Communication Association meeting in 1997 (the presentation which that article is based) which was, as he stated at the conference, "not scholarship." At the risk of sounding pretentious myself, I would argue that it was scholarship, just not necessarily good scholarship.

But the value of Parks' "cosmetic" scholarship is not what is at issue, but rather it is the logic that because confessional or performative scholarship uses autoethnographic writing it fails to be scholarship. What becomes the issue here is legitimacy--an attack that amounts to affirmation by negation where if I can put down this writing then mine can be left stable and unquestioned. At stake in any conversation about what 'counts,' is who gets excluded and included. Rather than judging on quality, as Goodall suggests, critics of autoethnographic or performative writing desire to shut down the possibility of this work because to grant it the ability of being considered risks opening up what counts as scholarly discourse (see also Pelias "Performative" 5).

In an effort to discuss what this kind of writing does for scholarship, Della Pollock suggests six basic accomplishments that good performative writing should have: it should be 1) evocative, 2) metonymic, 3) subjective, 4) nervous, 5) citational, and 6) consequential (80-94). While each of these combine to make a convincing case for performative writing, I want to focus on just one of Pollock's list which speaks to the criticisms articulated by Parks. When Pollock discusses this writing as evocative, she urges that this form of writing operate "metaphorically to render absence present . . . [and] evoke worlds that are other-wise intangible, unlocatable" (80). Because performative writing functions in this way, it "expands the notions of what constitutes disciplinary knowledge" (Pelias, "Performative" 5). This expansion fosters growth, constitutes a greater ground for scholarship and thus energizes our work to move beyond the current academic borders creating a rich ground for social critique and action.

Confession and like scholarship threatens the rational basis of the academy . . .

Perhaps the most disturbing criticism offered by the critics are those that critique confessional, autoethnographic or performative writing based on the rationalistic grounds. It becomes clear to me that those who offer this kind of critique are judging this scholarship based on a purpose not of its own design. It is like measuring quality of gourmet coffee based on weight: it doesn't measure up because it is a measure of the wrong thing. I am convinced by those who argue that the clear problem is that some are evaluating this research on the wrong scales--that different questions should be asked in regards to research (Ellis, Goodall):

What I've been saying . . . is that I think the major problems or challenges facing writers of autobiography or autoethnography are those based in a deep disciplinary misunderstanding of our purpose in deploying prose that way. I think this is made worse by trying to associate evaluative and ethical standards for traditional scholarly work with what is clearly an interpretive genre that does not share the narrative goals or poetic values of traditional scholarship. (Goodall 10)

The fact that different kinds of objectives are being sought after in this research means that the old standards of scholarly evaluation needs to be revisited and perhaps revised. I tend to agree with Ellis who yearns to ask different questions about research: "What does scholarship do? How is scholarship used? How do we feel when we read it? What meaning does it give to our lives as academics?" (np). The kinds of questions might be more appropriate for this writing/performance and just might capture more clearly what research should do in this world. If the goals of research are not about what scholarship does in and to the social scene in which it is placed, than I agree with Goodall that it is "a damn shame" (11).

Finally, I want to confess that in this argument I have used Wendt and Parks as straw figures in the effort to make my own case. However, I wanted to use their work because they sum up much of the criticism that works against scholars doing this type of work. My intention was not to stake my argument on anyone's body, but rather to find a way of reasoning back to their claims. Their arguments against this work finds support from a history of scholarly representation, yet like Pelias' students I locate hope in this effort to search out more "eloquence, feeling, and insight" in our scholarly work (15).

We aren't writing to argue with anyone. We don't want a fight. We aren't aiming to win some kind of infantile war of bigger words. We aren't playing childish games such as 'my [theoretical] daddy is bigger than your [theoretical] daddy, or participating in the usual comparisons about the length of our scholarly cigars. . . . What I hope we are doing in the practice of autoethnography is evolving to a higher state of scholarly conscience (Goodall 10-11)

In between spurts at the keyboard, I reach for my glass of water. The water is clear but slightly warmed under the light from the lamp. Next to the cup is one of my partner's homemade Christmas cookies, slightly misshapen. They are gingerbread cookies shaped into differing images, with colored frosting splattered and drizzled across them. The one next to my cup appears to be in the shape of a horse, through I suspect it is a reindeer, with red frosting splattered across it. It looks like a horse that was recently shot with some kind of automatic weapon. The cookie looks rather sad in the harsh lights of my desk lamp.

As I turn back to my photocopied essays, Gray and Ellis, I am reminded of both scholars' concern about violence. Gray uses the calling of the police as his metaphor, while Ellis wonders why questions of exclusion and inclusion are where people spend their critical time. Again my eyes turn to the bloody cookie. It seems appropriate lying there under the light like a carcass on an autopsy table. I remember how upset my partner was that the cookies turn out so badly--they are misshapen, discolored, and all together not what she hoped they would look like. She worries what other people will think when they see the misshapen Christmas trees with blood dripping off the branches.

I pick up the cookie and bite off the leg of the wounded horse. The sweet taste of ginger and sugar fill my mouth and I close my eyes to savor the flavor. It occurs to me that anyone who chooses not to enjoy these cookies based in surface fear (shape, color, or form) will only miss out on the richness and texture that the cookie has to offer. I place the horse, now half gone, back on the desk.

I take a small drink of water and think back to the arguments I am trying to make. What can I do to suggest the richness of this work, the texture of this work, the metaphoric use of this work? What can I do? Can I create a reasoned argument that captures what I long to say? Can I really argue completely that the endeavors of the police spending so much time on policing are really missing the point? I shake my head. I pick up the remainder of the cookie thinking it is hopeless. As I bite down, again tasting the flavor of the little cookie, I look at the crumbs. They are in a small pile next to my coaster. I brush them off the table, like they don't matter, and turn back to the keyboard. The crumbs, now discarded, fall silently to the ground. Surely there must be something I can say. . . .

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Corey, Frederick C. and Thomas K. Nakayama. "Sextext." Text and Performance Quarterly 17 (1997): 58-68.

Ellis, Carolyn. "What Counts as Scholarship in Communication? An Autoethnographic Response." American Communication Journal 1 (1998) np (read it here).

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Pelias, Ronald J. "Confessions of An Apprehensive Performer." Text and Performance Quarterly 17 (1997): 25-32.

-----. "Performative Writing as Scholarship: An Apology, An Argument, An Anecdote." Paper presented at the 1998 National Communication Association, New York NY (November 1998).

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-----. "Passing Comfort: Racism and a Search for Voice." Paper presented at the 1998 National Communication Association, New York NY (November 1998).

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