Conscripted Collaborators: Family Matters in Autoethnography

Abstract

In this collaborative piece, an autoethnographer discusses the ethics of her children’s appearance in her own work, in conversation with one of her (now adult) daughters. Ethical frameworks that approach public exposure primarily as a potential source of harm offer an insufficient frame for the relational effects of stories that bring our personal lifeworlds into our professional publications. Some forms of borrowing, even theft, can hover between trespass and intimacy, as the value of what has been taken is both appropriated and affirmed. How do we determine the “goodness” of work that involves constrained consent, and what does appearing in your mother’s publications do? We offer no answers but mull over the tangle of love and loyalty on which such work depends.