Negotiating and Navigating my Fat body - feminist autoethnographic encounters

Abstract

Over the last two years I have been consciously critically engaging with autoethnography as a way of gaining insight into the cultural phenomenon of being a fat woman. Autoethnography is an in-depth and engaged approach which opens up spaces of particular ways of being which have often been colonised by particular discourse in formed by invested situational knowledge. This process has involved me drawing on past journals, memories and re-memory work and present interwoven layers of process and reflection (Ronai 1995). It has been and is challenging, Chatham-Carpenter (2010) writes about the difficulties of being with and exposing vulnerable 'selves' - a self which is still very much part of the present, rather than a neatly contained and managed 'identity'. So part of what I will do in this article is consider the critical process of my feminist autoethnography, interweaving and responding to the literature' in feminist research, feminisms, autoethnography, critical fat studies, and intersectionality.  A key to this exploration is the experience of researching the experiences of being a fat woman, from within a feminist commitment - at some level I want to consider whether and how the experience reflects Averett, Soper's (2011, 371-372) suggestion that "Feminist autoethnography is intended to resist the social and institutional norms that often dictate research. It promotes women's voices and unique experiences".