Abstract
Resistance to cultural narrative entrapment has been my sustained and increasingly philosophically informed critical cultural standpoint position since I started writing autoethnography in the mid-1990s. This position has three components: At the philosophical level, I reflexively engage with who I want myself to be and what I know about myself in relation to the world. I do this in terms of my enduring dispositional tendency to react against centripetal forces pulling me into conformist identities. At the sociological level, this tendency is played out in my scholarly work, in celebrating, justifying, and reflexively representing outsider, as opposed to mainstream conformist, choices and ways of living. Finally, at the level of advancing social justice, I write in resistance to cultural narrative entrapment. This is because such entrapment can force people into stories they don’t want to be part of – often experienced as narrative violence, or an assault on narrative identity. On this basis, my doctoral study aims to address an incompleteness in the narrative autoethnographic literature by articulating: what constitutes resistance to cultural narrative entrapment in philosophical autoethnography; why it is important to resist this; the philosophical and related conceptual, theoretical, and social scientific issues emerging from the ways I address resistance to cultural narrative entrapment across the portfolio of my work; and, finally, the implications arising for the development of philosophical autoethnography. Having thus remedied the incompleteness in the literature, I go on to claim that my study makes an original contribution to knowledge in several ways, the main one being advancing the social justice agenda of narrative autoethnography through raising the importance of the cultural narrative entrapment concept for autoethnographic communities. I end my study with my responses to an extensive autocritique of the arguments and standpoint positions I have raised throughout my critical commentary.