Advanced diarology: mortification, materiality and meaning-making

Public diary-reading events, arguably originating in the USA in 2002, continue to draw participants eager to share their teenage angst and juvenilia, yet there is little scholarly reflection on this peripheral practice of performative writing. Having birthed our own version in 2017 – within the safe harbour of the academy and using an intuitive, practice-based methodology – we believe there are some useful questions to pose about the autoethnographic contributions of this mortification rite. Eighteen months in, we are further moved to ask, what is happening in the presentational and performative space as we show our younger selves to one another as we have, and do? This article, a follow-up to our previous Diarology for beginners (2019), formally reiterates on the page the associative leaps and communal meaning-making arising from our explorations so far. Prompted by questions, such as, ‘Is the practice of diary keeping inherently gendered? Is it about becoming visible? Audible? Memorable? What? And what is the impulse to publicly share the archives?’ (Munro, Murray and Taylor 2019), we draw on the literature around diary keeping, as well as theories on voice, gender and creative autoethnography, as a way into understanding diary performing and the public sharing of juvenile shame.