"The Tumbler" : writing an/other in fiction and performance ethnography

This article dissolves the binary between science and literature with a performance text set in rural Australia. This performance suggests that the imaginative act of fiction writing and the social scientific act are kept apart in a false binary that refies the privilege of presence and the audacity of authenticity. Inspired by a poststructuralist suspicion of any truth as sacred originary, the author takes a chance on an imaginative writing practice that enables researcher/writer/performer and audience to encounter the Other in positive, touching, affective, and meaningful ways. The voice of this Other speaks us into an aggressively embodied sense of geographic and social isolation, the inadequacies of community support for women in crisis, and the possibilities for agency in an impossible situation. Her monologue becomes a more nuanced and discursively complex way of confronting these issues than could be achieved with a traditional social scientific analysis.