Telling Multiracial Tales: An Autoethnography of Coming Out Home

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Gay & Lesbian, Media Archive, United States on 2013-12-16 20:29Z by Steven

Telling Multiracial Tales: An Autoethnography of Coming Out Home

Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 20, Number 1 (January 2014)
pages 51-60
DOI: 10.1177/1077800413508532

Benny LeMaster
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

What follows are experimental autoethnographic tales of ambiguous embodiment. The tales weave in and out of the text and work to articulate gender in unsuspecting spaces. Together, we reconsider gender through multiple locations at once. I offer an autoethnography of multiracial tales: a simultaneous telling of embodiment as it manifests in my multiracial body. Rather than privileging one “side” of the family over another, I experiment with a concurrent telling. That is, multivocality in one body. To help anchor the telling, I use the academy as an assemblage of meaning. In the end, I find that my White family resists and rejects my queer masculinity because of my pursuit of higher education while my Asian family embraces my queer masculinity because of the same pursuit. These stories can only be known when told and processed concurrently; never alone, and never separate.

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On Being Amorphous: Autoethnography, Genealogy, and a Multiracial Identity

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2009-11-11 16:04Z by Steven

On Being Amorphous: Autoethnography, Genealogy, and a Multiracial Identity

Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 9, Number 1 (2003)
pages 20-48
DOI: 10.1177/1077800402239338

Sarah N. Gatson, Associate Professor of Sociology
Texas A&M University

The article is a sociologically informed approach to understanding the author’s own place and identity. Questions of personal identity serve to highlight larger insights about a crucial reality in the United States. The author engages a standpoint at the crux of America’s racial dilemma, combined with a specialization in research on race and ethnicity. First, the interactive and overlapping set of methodologies within which her own narrative of identity fits is discussed. These data are systematically collected and analyzed field notes, historical documents, and the embedded interactions from within a larger culture of literature, scholarship, and popular understandings. The body of the article consists of three examples that she characterizes as confronting her Blackness, confronting her multiracialness, and confronting her Whiteness.

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Raising Chicanos in the Great White North: A White Mother’s Muse

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Women on 2009-08-07 23:42Z by Steven

Raising Chicanos in the Great White North: A White Mother’s Muse

Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 15, Number 7, (July 2009)
pages 1155-1177
DOI: 10.1177/1077800409338033

Traci Fordham-Hernández, Assistant Professor of Performance and Communication Arts
St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY

This article explores paradoxes in being the White mother of Mexican American children and discusses how some of its attendant issues contrast one another.  The author, an American scholar, believes she is taught to think and to write, not from the heart, but from a detached and “objective,” cerebral cortex, and she sees the places, the prism through which the world is seen, are constantly shifting.  The author writes of liminality and simultaneity, “I’m ‘swimming in the sea’ as both the swimmer, struggling, and part of the sea, itself, pulling myself under, drowning in between-ness . . .”  The headings, “From the Shore,” provide a detached, theoretical reflection upon the author’s experiences as a White mother of mixed-race children: “I’m standing on the banks, looking into my experiences and speaking from my ’head’,” and the headings, “In the Sea,” provide stories: “I’m immersed in the depths of my experiences and reflecting from my ‘heart’.”

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