Becoming a manual: au(n)to-ethnography and queer performances of a Greek theía

ABSTRACT In this essay, I draw on my diasporic queer aunting experiences in dialogue with observations of embodied homemaking pedagogies to think about the aunt—specifically the Greek theía—as a guidance manual. Understanding manuals beyond written instructions, as performances that create “guidelines” to live by, I elaborate on queer autoethnography that incorporates auntieness into self-narration and analysis. Describing how I become a queer aunt, I show how aunts may serve as queer manuals that teach us to engage with heterostatic conventions of “success” and “failure” only to learn how to destabilize them from within. I frame this method as au(n)to-ethnography.