Cripping Auto-/Ethnography?

Yvonne Wechuli^*

• University of Kassel, Kassel, Hesse, Germany

Given the crisis of representation (of the other) (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and complicated histories of othering, ethnography seems to be a methodology in need of cripping. Autoethnography, then, is one approach to solve said crisis of representation. Down to classics like Robert Murphy's (2001) The Body Silent, Disability Studies often use authors' autobiographical experience in a way that may be called autoethnographic. However, Disability Studies authors rarely engage with methodological literature on autoethnography. Moreover, autoethnographic literature frames Murphy ( 2001) and others as "first-person illness narratives" (Anderson 2006, 387), which I read as one indication that autoethnography might play into a tragedy narrative of disability. This paper tries to think through what it can mean to crip auto-/ethnography. To this end, I introduce cripping as an emancipatory strategy that promotes changing how one feels about disability and gather previous attempts of cripping academic knowledge production, which specifically center ableist temporal and emotional norms. In a second step, I outline ethnography and autoethnography as methodologies of interest and elaborate, which methodological development could be harnessed for cripping and in which ways both could benefit from further cripping.