Telling tales? Using ethnographic fictions to speak embodied 'truth'

This article traces my journey into embodied methodologies as I endeavoured to accurately and ethically research and represent experiences of body-marking practices (i.e. body modification and self-injury). Because of the fundamentally embodied nature of body-marking, v sought methodologies which were equally embodied and able to contain and represent the complex, emotive, fluid and dynamic nature of these experiences. It was also essential tome that the knowledge forms I produced, in empirical and epistemological terms, avoided the dualism and hierarchy which pervade our logocentric norms. Both the form and practice of my research, then, required an ethic which was specifically embodied and which grew out of corporeal experience, Here, I describe the research journey which drew me into the strategy of 'ethnographic fiction', and how this practice answered many of the issues and dilemmas posed by the specific and bodily nature of my work, and my own relationship with it.