“Here to Tell Her Story”

Abstract

This article examines the debate between honoring the agency of the teller of personal stories and honoring the stories themselves as legitimate objects of critical inquiry. It takes an autoethnographic monologue of a woman who has recently experienced homelessness from zAmya Theatre Project’s community-based play Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup) as an extended case study and employs multiple existing models of analyzing autoethnographic performance, critiquing each model in turn, and assessing these methods in relationship to the desire to ethically analyze autoethnography.