I hate chicken breast: a tale of resisting stories and disembodied knowledge construction

Abstract

In this performance autoethnography, the author explores the simultaneity of telling and resisting stories of lived experience. In the process, the author constructs the notion of “resisting stories” as autoethnographic narratives that both resist and demand telling in the process of making themselves public. In the process the author engages in a dialog with Della Pollock’s article “The Performative I.” He tries to re-present accounts of growing up poor through his experiences of class, race, and gender. From an eating/not eating moment he tries to create resisting stories; resisting alcoholism, resisting patriarchal structures with love and anger, resisting disembodied knowledge construction that still tends to reproduce the very oppression it intends to challenge, and resisting narrative that defies the “existence” of a broken family living in a vacuum.