This autoethnographic account explores the complex relationship between language and identity.
"I have personally been that teenager, marking down “white” on a school application, hesitating to answer when an Anglo-American asked me “what are you?”, and leaving those experiences with a deeper sense of displacement."
”I still aim to engage in the process of life, commit to a meaningful purpose, and structure my life around an intrinsically satisfying activity. For me, I will continue writing as a way to make sense of what it means to be alive.”
"My parents drank wine with dinner every night. There’s nothing remarkable about that, but to a kid growing up in Mid-Missouri it was weird."
"This essay on bodily autonomy specifically discusses abortion access and rights in the United States and Canada, and the politics that often follow."
"I had no idea what the repercussions would be should I disclose my identity to my students. Would I be fired? Would I be questioned? Would I be told not to talk of such things? This reticence is a sad reflection on my internalized homophobia, my being still uncomfortable enough with my identity such that I had to worry about keeping it secret."
"As a New Age Sage or “Saxion”, it’s important to understand that to move things forward I must accept a challenge - to reinvent myself."
"This autoethnographic poetry is born of my personal experience, witness, as well as currently chronicled and ancestral lore."
"It is in finding these solutions, the tape and the glue that holds us all together, that we find the beauty of who we are as people."
In this piece, a queer university student from China reflects on his understandings of sexual and ethnic/national identities as he moves from China to the UK to study.
"My poems for this special issue seek to document a history of my choice, not just personally but humanly, to use autoethnography to weave through the personal and the political."
"I write at length about my experiences surviving rape and abuse as a Western woman in Japan. I was lucky to get out alive."