Troubling Tolichism in Several Voices

Abstract

This article is dialogic. Several voices engage together from the loci of embodied, relational, and textual standpoints. Tacitly informed by the voices of friends, colleagues, and respected others, the first and second authors have a conversation with and between themselves, and with readers. This is conducted around the presence of a boxed-text voice, written more formally and rhetorically by the first author. The main story is the authors’ critical reaction to selected aspects of the “Tolichist” voice. This voice is regarded as promoting epistemic violence toward critical and creative analytical autoethnographers, in the areas of relational ethics and methodology. The other related—back, subsidiary, and implicit—stories emerging include alienation from the insidious cultural backdrop of patriarchy and misogyny; two conceptions of “autonomy”; the development of a neophyte critical autoethnographer; colonization and resistance; the bifurcation of assumptions about autoethnographic writing; and the importance of philosophy for autoethnographic scholarship. The article ends in a meta-reflexive exchange between both authors about its content.