Becky Higgins reflects on her position as an autoethnographic researcher working collaboratively on the topics of memory and illness, exploring the queerness of storytelling as method.
In March 2025, at the end of the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD school, my fellow participants and I were asked to write notes to our future selves. They would arrive by mail a few months after the school ended. Opening the letter addressed from me to me felt a bit like a warning. The letter was wordy, but one line stood out: “there doesn’t always need to be proof”.
Re-reading the letter prompted me to think about what, exactly, had led to this statement. Proof, and to a larger extent, truth are entangled concepts within the research I do. As an autoethnographic researcher who sits in the space between sociology, visual arts and the humanities, I am used to defending both my method of choice and my position within the disciplinary ‘in-between’.
This feeling of outsiderness translated to my position within the School. Despite being a queer researcher, I was one of the only people in our cohort that wasn’t working on a queer-specific topic. This led me to regress to the familiar feeling of not being queer enough. My note-to-self touched on this as well, reminding me to be confident in owning my position as a queer researcher. As a bisexual person in a cishet presenting relationship, the feeling of inferiority in queer spaces isn’t a particularly new cross to bear. The content of the two notes I made in my letter felt like they wouldn’t intertwine or exist together outside of the piece of paper they were written on. However, a life lived in between both academic and identity-based binaries means that any displacement is felt deeply. I found myself questioning where I fit amongst the group, and what made my research queer enough to attend the school.
The position of method and truth in queer research
During the school, I was surprised and relieved to see that academics João Florêncio and Edyta Just would be leading a session titled ‘Locating the “I”: autoethnography as queer methodology. Despite being an autoethnographer—my PhD is a collaborative autoethnography—and autoethnographers Tony Adams and Stacy Holman Jones (2016) declaring that autoethnography is a queer methodology, I hadn’t critically examined this concept before. I hadn’t yet made the connection that queering autoethnography doesn’t have to mean focussing on topics of queer identity. But it became clear to me during the workshop that choice of method can be as queer an act in research as researching the queer community. The queerness is inherent in the method itself, which performs resistance by writing against coherence, allowing for fractured, messy, and contradictory accounts.
‘Truths’ are constructed through narrative not to produce definitive facts, but to uncover how we make meaning in relation to our experiences and connections with those around us. In this sense, autoethnography can become both an act of storytelling the self, and accidental collaboration. In telling about ourselves, the histories and stories of our ancestors often come to light, particularly in the ways that their experiences, or our perceptions of them, colour our own.
This potential for autoethnography to be collaborative, even when the collaborator is absent, became apparent to me during a writing exercise in the workshop led by Florêncio and Just. My first thought was “I’m not a writer: that’s my twin sister’s job.” I chose to reflect on this thought throughout the exercise, writing ‘truths’ I believed about myself and ‘truths’ I believed about my sister. Autoethnography redefines truth as subjective, situated, and constructed through personal experience. It is a rare method which celebrates subjectivity, engaging directly with the unreliability of experiences that are felt, lived, and relational. In writing lists of both my sister’s and my ‘truths’ through my own perspective, I thought about how, if she were given the same opportunity, her telling of the events I noted would likely be radically different.
Autoethnography, Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner (in Cengiz and İşler, 2023) write, is not and has never been about “telling the truth with a capital T”. It’s about telling the truth of an experience while simultaneously recognising that multiple ‘truths’ can coexist. Storytelling likewise has a complex history with truth: there is almost always an embellishment, somewhere. I would argue no one is free of this habit, especially in the complex context of cross-generational narratives.
Intergenerational storytelling is queer
Receiving my letter, performing the autoethnographic writing exercise, and thinking about the position of queerness in storytelling prompted me to reflect on a piece of research I conducted in 2022, whilst studying for a Medical Humanities degree. I had written about finding a letter left in my grandmother’s apartment after her death some twenty years ago, an object I took, kept, and revealed to no one else in my family. Alongside the content of the letter, I also analysed writing by my sister that reimagined my grandmother’s life in fiction, drawing from the snapshots of her life we had been privy to.
I understood my sister’s desire to make meaning of my grandmother’s life through the process of storytelling. Everything we thought we knew about her was a story whispered in the midnight darkness of various hallways, an event retold in the space above the kitchen sink on a rainy Thursday afternoon, a casually confused stringing together of third-party experiences that were always constructed by anyone but the subject herself. The purpose of the research was initially to try and untangle the lived truth of this past life in the present tense, a process which Carolyn Hamilton (2015) describes as “double-storiedness”: an acknowledgement of events and lives of the past, and their traces in the present.
Stories that cross generations fit into the space between fact and fiction in a way that is, at its core, queer. A central tenet of queer theory is how it is framed to oppose conservative knowledge production processes (Adams and Holman-Jones, 2011). This pronounced resistance to fixed ways of knowing opens up space for intergenerational storytelling to be seen as queer, not only in what it says, but in how it’s shared across time and relationships.
Ample research has identified intergenerational storytelling, particularly within the context of folklore, as inherently queer due to the narrative form it takes (Bradway, 2021). Such relational storytelling challenges rigid norms, allowing diverse voices to explore and reimagine accepted social and personal histories and futures. At the most basic level, even the nuanced structures of different narrative forms can be both normalising and disruptive. The way that we find stories (or they find us) is itself a process of disentangling expectations of objectivity. There is queerness in what is said and how it is said, but there is also queerness in what is left out.
Within collaborative storytelling, there is an overwhelming sense of liminality, of a balance which hangs on the unreliability of memory, family, emotion and connection. Queer and postmodern readings of stories often focus on the ways queerness can act as a powerful disruptor of established narrative structures (Bradway, 2021), destabilising conventional plots and binaries. The process of intergenerational storytelling itself can then be framed as queer in that histories are rethought and re-imagined over time. Stories are embellished, flourishes are added, but there is also power in the things that are omitted, forgotten, and misplaced. In intergenerational storytelling, particularly when there is an absence of one storyteller, objectivity is disrupted, and the artificial distancing of individual reflection and quantifiable truth is contended with.
Telling our stories, whilst interpreting the stories of others within the context of our own lived experiences, offers the opportunity for trauma, often thought of as extremely individual, to become transindividual, located within the self and the other. The purpose of storytelling across generations is not to hand down suggestions of an objective truth that attempts to explain how the present has come to be, and therefore look to how similar experiences might be circumnavigated in the future. The inheritance of stories comes with an expectation of knowing, of holding the weight of the past and carrying it, acknowledging what has existed before and how the claw marks of experience can’t always be explained.
Queer theory suggests that reflexive practices such as storytelling must position individual experiences and reflection in a relational rather than comparative partnership. For any researcher to maintain a reasonable distance from a subject they are socially embedded in is no mean feat; of that, no one is free. Instead, stories themselves provide a place for unpacking and addressing social norms by the very nature of making public what was once private.
Territories of truth in research
The question of impartiality and its importance in claiming ‘truth’ is an inevitable shadow across research, but one in which there is space for reflection. Both autoethnography and queer theory ask similar questions: whose truths matter? Whose stories are valid? Further, it is in the process of storytelling that queerness is enacted: the form is relational, embodied, open-ended, and resistant to closure. This resistance is key. It pushes against narratives that try to purport objectivity as possible within subjective truths.
I concluded my MA research by writing the following:
“Intergenerational trauma…can exist within us like a tar pit, deep inside, some inescapable black stickiness that swallows endangered species and carries their fossils around forever.”
Perhaps the same could be said about stories. Or the remnants of stories: the fragments that remain embedded within and across generations and resist conforming to narrative rules. When I was younger, storytelling was a place of safety, of familiarity, of comfort. Stories were the pockets of refuge in which we found salvation. But stories don’t just shelter us. They also unsettle us, pulling us into the blurry spaces between memory and invention, where comfort gives way to complexity and meaning takes on new, less certain shapes.
In the process of intergenerational storytelling, experiences from the past are excavated, the boundaries and nuances of truth rethought. The gaps, embellishments, and missteps that occur in the process of reimagining lives lived before are often the places where meaning makes a home, prioritising that hidden place between memory and myth, fact and fiction.
About the author
Becky (Rebecca) Higgins (she/her) is an ESRC funded PhD student in Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on experiences of absence, using creative methods to uncover hidden knowledge. She comes from Northampton in the Midlands and won’t let anyone forget it.
About the 2025 Medical Humanities PhD School
This post is part of a collection of contributions from attendees of the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School which took place in Durham in March 2025. The PhD school was funded by Wellcome, as part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, and the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics (CMHB) at Linköping University.
All articles in this collection can be found on this page: 2025 Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School.
References
Adams, T. E., and Holman Jones, S. (2011). Telling Stories: Reflexivity, Queer Theory, and Autoethnography. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 11(2), 108-116. (Original work published 2011).
Bradway, T. (2021). Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 136(5), 711–727.
Cengiz, A.S and İşler, D. (2023). Talking about Autoethnography and Narratives: An Interview with Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner. (2022). Postgraduate lecture on June 13, 2022, at the Department of Folklore in the Faculty of Language and History and Geography of Ankara University. Transcription via Folklor/edebiyat, 29(115), 967–1000.
Hamilton, C. (2015). Archives, Ancestors and the Contingencies of Time. Laute, Bilder, Texte: Register des Archivs, 103.
Jones, S. L. H., and Adams, T. E. (2010). Autoethnography is a queer method. In K. Browne, and C. J. Nash (Eds.), Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research (pp. 195-214). Ashgate Publishing Limited.
