Embodying/writing/performing “women’s work”: pleasurable tensions and double binds of feminist performative autoethnography

ABSTRACT This essay explores a feminist aesthetics of performative autoethnography. I trace the connections between performance studies and feminist body-writing practices and argue for the creative double bind as a heuristic for negotiating the “pleasurable tensions” between body/paper/stage. Locating these connections and tensions in my autoethnographic performance work, I articulate three double binds – material/social, personal/political, and aesthetic/ethic – that illustrate the “women’s work” of feminist performative autoethnography.