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Academic librarians have complex and numerous professional identities. We are researchers, teachers, artists, administrators, and technologists. Many of us have advanced degrees in other fields, in which we may or may not remain active. We grapple with burnout and impostor syndrome, experience and confront racism in our workplaces, and are strongly affected by university politics and bureaucracy. In The Self as Subject: Autoethnographic Research into Identity, Culture, and Academic Librarianship, the authors tease out these complexities using autoethnographic methodology.

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This essay focuses on intersections of reflexivity as both an orientation to research and a writing practice that brings together the method of autoethnography and the paradigm of queer theory. Taking seriously autoethnography’s and queer theory’s commitments to uncertain, fluid, and becoming subjectivities, multiple forms of knowledge and representations, and research as an agent of change, we write a series of reflexively queer personal texts. These texts ask us—as writers and readers in a community of scholars—to question our desire to name and claim stories and to embrace the gifts and challenges of open texts and the importance of reflexivity as we test the limits of knowledge and certainty.

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There is a vital, yet often unrealized relationship between storytelling and critical approaches to autoethnography. Where autoethnography brings the personal, the concrete, and an emphasis on storytelling to our scholarship, it often leaves us wanting for clear and powerful theoretical frameworks for understanding how such stories help us write into or become the change we seek in the world. Critical theory provides us with such frameworks, though it is often dismissed as jargon-laden, difficult, and impersonal. The “critical” in critical autoethnography reminds us that theory is not a static or autonomous set of ideas, objects, or practices. Instead, theorizing is an ongoing process that links the concrete and abstract, thinking and acting, aesthetics, and criticism in what performance studies scholar Della Pollock describes as “living bodies of thought.” This essay engages a practice of performative and queer storytelling that links the concreteness, risk, and poetry of autoethnographic stories with the powerful intellectual and political commitments of critical theory as one example of critical autoethnography as a living body of thought.

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