Life disentangled : a performative autoethnographic inquiry on suicidality

• Main Author: Lo, Chia-Ying
• Published: University of Bristol 2014
• Subjects: 362.28
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.682357

An invisible shadow was blocking my life making me unable to act or think as I wished to. It was an unpleasant life, a life not worth living. The feeling of desperation brought me to the point where I wanted to finish my life. I had tried to find rel.ease in many ways but I could not find one. I came to academia, hoping to do research on my own misery, to release the tangle binding me and to find a way to live on. Among many methodologies, I found the 'felt-text' of Spry's performative autoethnography and reckoned it could be helpful because it examined each subtle emotion or feeling contained in the narratives where my confusing life stories were told. Therefore, I applied the theories of her work in my inquiry on suicidality. In this dissertation, after a Prologue, there is a section of scripts and themes. The texts of my life stories are written in the form of dramatic scripts with narratives on one side of the page and physical movements on the other side. I show the elements of performativity of the texts in this way. After each script of my life stories, there is a theme. These themes are reflections from an aspect of the way I see the events that happened to me given by the title of the theme. After this section, I write about the processes of writing and reflecting as methodology. At the end, I have some thoughts concerning ethical and political issues because of the sensitive nature of this sort of inquiry. The process of writing this dissertation is the process of doing the inquiry and will continue. At different points within the process, some questions were answered, some problems were solved and some of the tangles that choked me were released