To Be a (M)other: A Feminist Performative Autoethnography of Abortion

Abstract

This is an abortion story. A feminist story. A body story. An autoethnographic story. This is a story of learning how to story abortion in a culture unforgiving to abortion stories. A story of embodying a body deemed unworthy of embodiment. A story of enfleshment enmeshed amid silence and violence. Influenced by feminist embodied auto-epistemologies, this essay seeks to disrupt the functionality of the U.S. American abortion debate through a performative, somatic reclamation of my experience from the semantic constrictions of highly medicalized, politicized, and individualized hegemonic discourses. Engaging a feminist performative autoethnographic praxis informed by écriture feminine, I center my corporeal body as a site of epistemological value to speak back against the limiting narratives of/about abortion while illustrating the critical creative potentials of performative autoethnographic storytelling. This essay weaves theory, lyric prose, epistolary, and poetry to performatively reconstruct, reframe, and reclaim my abortion experience through an embodied autoethnographic framework, in hopes of illuminating possibilities for others to “[experiment] with how we might tell stories differently rather than simply telling different stories” (p. 16).