Critical Autoethnography

Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life

Robin M. Boylorn, Mark P. Orbe, Robin M. Boylorn, Mark P. Orbe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000261462
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Multikulturelle Bildung

Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life, Second Edition, examines the development of the field of critical autoethnography through the lens of social identity. Contributors situate interpersonal and intercultural experiences of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, citizenship, sexuality, and spirituality within larger systems of power, oppression, and privilege.

Approachable and accessible narratives highlight intersectional experiences of marginalization and interrogate social injustices. The book is divided into three sections: Complexities of Identity Performance, Relationships in Diverse Contexts, and Pathways to Culturally Authentic Selves. Each thematic section includes provocative stories that critically engage personal and cultural narratives through a lens of difference. The chapters in the book highlight both unique and ubiquitous, extraordinary and common experiences in the interior lives of people who are Othered because of at least two overlapping identities. The contributors offer first person accounts to suggest critical responses and alternatives to injustice.

The book also includes sectional summaries and discussion questions to facilitate dialogue and self-reflection. It is an excellent resource for undergraduate students, graduate students, educators, and scholars who are interested in autoethnography, interpersonal and intercultural communication, qualitative studies, personal narrative, cultural studies, and performance studies.

PART I

Complexities of Identity Performance

1
WOUNDED

Diagnosis (for a) Black Woman

Aisha Durham

They fell. Tumbled out of my car compartment, hall closet, and oversized handbag. Dropped from over-stuffed file cabinets and desk drawers, there was no home-work crevice inescapable from being square-crammed or purple-package padded in my anxiety-ridden attempt to prepare for—in frantic Florida hurricane fashion—the pending red rush that could force me to change stained pants, line fabric chairs with grocery bag plastic, and sleep in mummified towel bottoms whenever my womb would erupt. I could not stop it. I failed. I failed to keep it under (the) cover and to keep up with the cultural “keep it moving” mantra when I found myself depressed and supine sinking on a tissue-covered exam table (Myles, 2013). It had been days after I pulled liver-like sacs like the innards my mother wiggled from an uncooked Sunday chicken. I was the mama-wannabe raw on the table believing I’d miscarried.

Where I pulled, the small-town doctor pushed, pressed, and prodded before he walked away to the sink to say, “Fibroids.” “Fibroids?” I asked, wanting the wiry white-haired man to slip me more than two fingers and a two-syllable word. Before then, I only heard the word whispered between aunties. It was a word that had my father pacing our galley kitchen fumbling through cabinets trying to find his footing for his old lady who no longer could stand working with anemia even after blood transfusions. My mother had a reluctant hysterectomy. I was too teen to talk to her about reproductive health. I do not remember much about those moments. I only remember my mother was more bothered about being bedbound than with “them taking her womb.” She got on her feet early to return to the hotel backroom to work room service. She treated fibroids as a no-fuss fact of Black life. Neither of us could know in that Florida salamander-colored office I would face a fibroid-future filled with fertility woes and well wishes after three surgeries to remove more than 20 masses years later. I leaned forward in my naivete, curling my neck to the doctor to repeat, “Fibroids.”

“It’s common,” he said. “You’re a Black woman.”

Weathering Systems

Fibroids are noncancerous uterine tumors that can adversely impact fertility and overall reproductive health. Symptoms can include heavy menstrual cycles, chronic pelvic pain, increased incontinence, sexual dysfunction, and extreme fatigue from anemia, which could be aggravated by diet and by environmental stress, trauma, or “unhealed pain” (Adeboyejo, 2006; Roberts-Grey, 2016, p. 116). U.S. born Black women are two times more likely than white women to be diagnosed with uterine tumors and up to 80 percent as likely to experience them (Beard, 2006). While early studies emphasized morbid obesity, immutable Middle Passage genetics (Domonoske, 2018), and a red meat, dairy-heavy diet (Caruana, 2007) as nature–culture conspirators, recent studies indicate “lifetime racism” as a significant environmental culprit that distinguishes African Americans from other Black women, and from other races regardless of class or health care access (Montagne & Martin, 2017; Wise et al., 2007). Lifetime racism is characterized by systemic and institutional discrimination in employment, housing, and police enforcement (Wise et al., 2007). Put another way, it is the long-term exposure to discrimination that induces fibroid growth. The correlation between perceived racism and fibroid growth is statistically significant in the South (Stewart, Nicholson, Bradley, & Borah, 2013).

My aggressive tumors appeared during my (re)productive tenure-earning years at two southern universities when the push to birth a book and baby while caring for my mother bedbound from pancreatic cancer became paramount. Since then, the professional “freedom” to flesh my experience is colored by a dim reality that the academy has also served as a place of slow death for Black women like me. This “excess disease burden” (Wise et al., 2007, p. 8) in our physical, cultural, and academic homeplaces weighs heavy. We are literally carrying the outgrowth of gendered racism inside of us.¹

We are Walking Wounded

To walk wounded is to recognize that the physical and psychic “lifeblood” draining us is a manifestation of gendered racism. It is also to recognize the life matter of humanness—a humanness that remains unremarkable for powerbrokers who objectify Black women for the supposed machine-mammy-mule gender-sex service roles we are expected to perform (Harris Perry, 2011). The professional masks we might don and the cultural codes we might enact to contest controlling images or power-laden stereotypes are coping mechanisms strategically deployed to withstand injury and harm in a racist necropolitical state that feeds off of Black women. The very growth of gynecology as a medical field is borne from the deliberate experimentation (read: torture) of unanesthetized, enslaved Black women. State-sanctioned sterilization remains so prevalent in the South that Black women during the Jim Crow era colloquially called it the Mississippi appendectomy (Roberts, 1997; Washington, 2006). Only after political pressure from Black feminists protesting the “father of gynecology” statue of J. Marion Sims in Central Park did New York City officials elect to move the statue to a Brooklyn cemetery in 2018 (Domonoske, 2018). Like the Black feminists before me, I cannot unknow this cultural and scholarly history in the hospital waiting room where my mother reminds me not to “let them take my womb.”² Wounded, for me, is more than a metaphor. It is a broaching term to open up an intimate conversation about environmental stressors that shape salient experiences of Black womanhood.

Wounded is conceived from a public health concept called weathering (Geronimus, Hicken, Keene, & Bound, 2006; Geronimus et al., 2010). Arline Geronimus describes weathering as the erosive impact of everyday racism that wears on Black women. It ages us. No matter the apparent outward youthfulness celebrated with the old adage “Black don’t crack,” Geronimus and others (2010) indicate at the molecular level Black women are advanced in age by 7.5 years internally. Early onset fibroids attest to it. Current research on weathering has widened from addressing high Black maternal mortality and premature death rates exclusively to examining racism as an environmental stressor shaping the individual and collective health of minoritized communities generally (Boylorn & Young, 2019a, 2019b; Cooper, 2018a; Domonoske, 2018). Both wounded and weathering invite me to consider how I used to joke about looking young, but feeling old because my “project years” in public housing added hard, experiential time to my life. Then, I would offer the joke to doctors who’d look at me with pity for preemptively putting me under the knife. I would offer it as a defense to my colleagues who’d treat me like an uninformed graduate student, or green Black faculty at best. But, I suppose I used it to console myself too when I wished to endure infantilization and marginalization in the academy that did not seem to match the Diggs Park violence of extreme poverty, disposability, and police brutality (Durham, 2014). Whether joking, defending, or consoling, wounded and weathering would suggest that my body absorbed both environmental life stressors viscerally.

This might be the case for Shalon. She fell. In an arresting National Public Radio and ProPublica feature story addressing weathering and Black women, the Atlanta epidemiologist Shalon Irving collapsed from high blood pressure after a mandatory early cesarean delivery because of previous scarring from fibroid surgery (Montagne & Martin, 2017). Up to that time, so much of Shalon’s life resembled mine. An over-achiever writing for her student newspaper, she took her undergraduate diploma from Virginia to earn a graduate degree in the midwest. Fibroids crowded out her chances to conceive naturally so after her surgery in her 30s, the wannabe mother invested in assisted fertility treatments. That Shalon researched experiences of structural inequality, trauma, and violence that echoed mine made me think of the “work” of our connected story. Neither education, occupation, class, nor advocacy could overcome centuries of dehumanization and disposability. There was no social-class buffer for professional Black women. My life, her death would seem much like misfortune or chance without acknowledging weathering, especially for Black mothers. I see Shalon with my mother Sharon together as twin alarm-bell tales about reproductive health, slow death, and the coping “keep it moving” internalization of gendered racism that adds to our injury and harm. They were walking wounded, weathering systems that failed them (Myles, 2013).

Digital Archives: Restor(y)ing Black Feminist Autoethnography

I present personal vignettes as autoethnographic snapshots to highlight epiphanic moments along my reproductive journey when the personal (e.g., body), political (e.g., Black feminism), and professional (e.g., researcher) collide. Autoethnography is a mind-mining excavation of memory. We recover memories to reconstruct the situated self in relation to other bodies—real or imagined—within a particular context or historical moment to understand culture (Durham, 2014, pp. 19–20). Black feminism uses intersectionality to analyze the body and shared experiences in order to theorize interlocking power and develop critical thought to advance social change (McClaurin, 2001). As a method committed to privileging embodied, experiential, and experimental cultural analyses of identity, power, and culture, critical autoethnography complements Black feminist thought and informs Black feminist autoethnography in communication and cultural studies (Boylorn, 2017; Boylorn & Orbe, 2016). Drawing from both theory and method, I story my experiences with fibroids and fertility remembering Shalon and Sharon, and I explore my experience of wounded in my personal and professional life to consider how wounded works as chronic wearing and as critical awareness of the physical and psychic condition of Black women.

Recent personal narratives penned as essay, autoethnography, and memoir help crystallize my experience about fibroids and fertility as well as my sense of self as a southern fat Black woman navigating the academy and the medical system (Cooper, 2018b; Cooper, Morris & Boylorn, 2017; Cottom, 2019). In a familiar refrain, the Black woman’s body that is deemed “undisciplined” (Gay, 2017) and “incompetent” (Cottom, 2019) is routinely dismissed, denied, disregarded, and derided in both spaces. Take for example Tressie McMillian Cottom. She carried two fibroid tumors while pregnant and was forced to advocate for herself to receive life-saving treatment that doctors and nurses initially ignored (Cottom, 2019, p. 84).

Cottom contends:

Like millions of women of color, especially black women, I was churned through a healthcare machine that neglected and ignored me until I was incompetent… The assumption of black women’s context will render legible, or that incompetence—we cannot know ourselves, express ourselves in a way that prompts people with power to respond to us as agentic beings—supersedes even the most powerful status cultures in all of neoliberal capitalism: wealth and fame.

(2019, pp. 85–86)

From Cottom and Cooper to Gay and Boylorn, they use the body to concretize experience and to challenge the assumptions of Black womanhood that devalue us.

In an agentic Black feminist stance...