Critical Autoethnography as Intersectional Praxis: A Performative Pedagogical Interplay on Bleeding Borders of Identity

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

1-1-2015

Abstract

For me, doing critical autoethnography is sometimes like capturing a picture of yourself in a glass, borderless frame; a picture in which an image of you is represented and there are sightless borders of containment; containments called race, sex, gender, culture, and occasions of human social experience fi xed in time and space, fl oating in a fi xed liquidity of memory, giving shape to experience, structuring vision and engagement with the intent for others to see and know you diff erently as you story the meaningfulness of personal experience in a cultural context. For me, this is the engagement of autoethnography. e critical in critical autoethnography captures a moment in that borderless frame and holds it to a particular scrutiny-intersplicing a sociology-of-theself with a hermeneutics of theorizing the self. Yet, in the process of such an engagement, there is always a feeling of risk: a risk of bleeding, in which the presumed categorical containments of your identity threaten to exceed its borders, revealing the ways in which we are always both particular and plural at the same time; never contained and always messy.

Original Publication Citation

Alexander, B. K. (2015). Critical Autoethnography as Intersectional Praxis: A Performative Pedagogical Interplay on Bleeding Borders of Identity. In N. K. Denzin & M. D. Giardina (Eds). Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Research (pp. 141- 157). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast. [Originally published In R. Boylorn and M. Orbe (2013).(Eds.) Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life (pp. 110-122). Left Coast Press.

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