Excerpt: It’s July 26, 2010, late. I’ve sunk onto the edge of the bed in my childhood home. The bedroom reminds me of one of those cozy, pretty Valentine’s Day shoeboxes I made back in elementary school: small, pink, white, flowery.

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In this exploration, I examine how autoethnographers create connections and community through the metaphor of the undead in their various forms. Autoethnography allows us to write and speak about our anxieties, our impolite private issues, and what frightens us at home and at work, including aging, guilt, mortality, shame, and lost love. Through autoethnography, we connect the seen and the invisible, the known and the unknown, the understood and the unexplained, mystery and science. It provides us the opportunity to reenchant the world. Most importantly, autoethnographic writing provides us the opportunity to recognize that our fears are not ours alone but are a basis upon which we can all connect.

In communication and family studies, narrative inheritance Òprovides us with a framework for understanding our identity throughÓ the stories of those who preceded us in our families (Goodall, 2005, p. 497). Ballard and Ballard (2011) supplement the concept of narrative inheritance with the idea of Ònarrative momentum,Ó suggesting that family identity moves forward into the future through the narratives the family tells (p. 80). In this account, I question the hegemony of both concepts, particularly narrative momentum which discounts the variety of family types, while supporting the dominant cultural discourses of what defines Òfamily.Ó

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Part of the session The Gender of Food: Perceptions and Perspectives from Food Labeling, Advertising, and the Family Dinner.

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