Accounts, stories, testimonies: modalities of producing autobiographical narratives from one’s political and situational context

Abstract

The objective of this article is to reflect on three self-narrative modalities. We dialogued with the works of Foucault (2019) and Butler (2015) on the techniques of the self and political subjectivation, which offer a perspective of resistance and experimentation to characterize the transforming power of the self-report. Then, we shift to the perspective of Zygouris (1995) to understand the narrative possibilities of testimony, especially regarding how traumatic events are appropriated by subjects in their process of self-realization, disidentification and contact with different alterities and subject positions. By means of theoretical reflections, we intend to bring forward some points of approximation and distancing between the modalities of self-narrative presented here. It is observed, therefore, that the autobiographical narrative expands itself in several modalities intertwined with the political and situational context.