Handing IRB an Unloaded Gun

The author's autoethnographic article was accepted for publication and then blocked by her Institutional Review Board (IRB). The overt reasons for the “denial of approval” differ from accounts given behind closed doors. By weaving experience, excerpts from her article, and the responses of others into a narrative, the author creates an ongoing performance ethnography that resists the “tacit norm of silence” regarding discussions of incest and student/teacher attraction. Framing autoethnography as a “breach” of the academic norms regarding scientific inquiry helps her make sense of how IRB as a committee used the resources at hand—the existing religious/political context, their identities, their formal roles, and the written rules they had before them—to coconstruct a narrative that rendered her manuscript unpublishable. It is the author's hope that this performance of resistance will help facilitate the creation of a safe, defined space (similar to that of oral history) for autoethnography to occur.