Running head: EMBODIMENT 1

Of Embodiment and Ether:

Understanding the Complexity of Relationships in American Masculine Culture

Jim Burns

South Dakota State University

EMBODIMENT 2

Of Embodiment and Ether:

Understanding the Complexity of Relationships in American Masculine Culture

When I first read Michael Kimmel’s (2008) Guyland, I imagined a dystopian “bro”

amusement park where guys wear gender straightjackets (Pollack, 2006) and enact and embody

the posted rules of the park: the “Guy Code.” As a teacher educator with an interest in

masculinities research, critical reflection on my own experiences in “Guyland’s” myriad

spaces—locker rooms, classrooms, intimate relationships, media, workplaces, the military, my

family, and the halls of academia—has been essential in the formation of research relationships

and negotiating an understanding of the lived experiences of others. Yet Kimmel (2008, p. 4)

stresses: “individual guys are not the same as ‘Guyland.’” My research, therefore, interrogates

normative and oppressive gender precepts, stereotypes, and hierarchies in our public curricula

and pedagogies through understanding the lived experiences of boys and young men in the

context of hegemonic masculine culture. In this work, I assume that gender is socially and

politically constructed, performative, comprises patterns of behavior that are fluid over time and

in context, and that a plurality of masculinities exists in which a hegemonic archetype sits atop

marginalized and subordinated masculinities (Butler, 1990; Connell, 1995; Foucault, 1990).

Despite the prevalence of oppressive and often violent modes of masculinity, my research has

revealed that young men and boys are both aware of oppressive codes of masculinity and often

practice counter-conduct in a governmental system of hierarchical classification through

practices of surveillance (Foucault, 1978/1991, 1990, 1995).

This paper represents a methodological reflection on my work thus far as a qualitative

researcher and teacher educator interested in the social production of public curricula and

pedagogies related to masculinities in cultural context. In her theorization of mestiza

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consciousness through her own lived experience, Anzaldúa (1987, p. 79-80) notes the critical

importance of disrupting the subject-object duality and binary thinking through “a massive

uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness.” Anzaldúa (1987)

calls on us to enter border spaces imbued with complexity, tension, and paradox. In this paper, I

reflect on some of the border spaces of which I have become aware in relationship with the

young men with whom I have worked to understand the plurality of masculinities situated in

American masculine culture and how that awareness has impacted me. Although in the context

of ongoing hermeneutic reflection I will certainly become aware of further border spaces, I

confine my discussion to border spaces in terms of a) critical qualitative research as critical

pedagogy; b) identity, positionality, and reflexivity; and c) the complex representation of lived

experience.

Perspective

I theoretically situate this work in Foucault’s (1978/1991) governmentality, which

comprises the discursively produced practices by which states control populations through the

creation of self-regulating subjects. Governmentality finds further nuance in “biopower”

(Foucault, 1990), which makes visible “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the

subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (p. 140). Governmentality is salient to

critical qualitative research methods and to masculinities studies in at least two ways. First,

governmental practices in various social, cultural, and political institutions, such as schools,

facilitate the embodiment of a hegemonic gender regime (Foucault, 1990; Butler, 1990, 2005;

Connell, 1995) and a host of other hegemonic practices. As a teacher and teacher educator, I am

particularly interested in the complicity of school structure, curriculum (both formal and hidden),

and pedagogy in reifying a hegemonic gender regime produced through complex social, cultural,

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ideological, and political discourses (Connell, 1996) through what Connell (1989, p. 295) calls a

“contest for hegemony between rival versions of masculinity.” Smith (2007, p. 188) further notes

that schools are a “prime mover” in shaping gender culture, with tough or hard forms of

masculinity symbolically rewarded by teachers who act as “cultural accomplices” in perpetuating

a socially constructed and often oppressive gender order. Schools are socio-politically situated in

a larger, complex governmental system; they are not politically objective or neutral in any way.

Second, the disciplinary practices of research are institutionalized in academia, which can

facilitate the researcher embodiment of hegemonic values, practices, and beliefs about research

purpose and method through what is valued and what is not and whose perspectives are included

and whose are excluded. Careful reflection on ourselves in the context of a system of

governmental practices and the biopolitics inherent in governmentality can help us understand

the importance of critical reflection on researcher identity and positionality, clarify our own

values, and see the spaces in which counter-conduct within a regime of governmental practice

can occur:

Biopolitics thus provides a prime instance of what Foucault calls here the ‘strategic

reversibility’ of power relations, or the ways in which the terms of governmental practice

can be turned around into focuses of resistance: or, as he put it in his 1978 lectures, the

way the history of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ is interwoven with the history

of dissenting ‘counter-conducts.’ (Gordon, 1991, p. 5)

Foucault (1978/1991) was clear that the concern of governmentality lie in the conduct of

conduct, and reflecting on my conduct of research thus far, I support a praxis of counter-conduct

through counter-narrative in the spirit of Goodall (2010) represented through critical qualitative

research as an act of critical pedagogy. Counter-conduct as counter-narrative can serve as

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performances of resistance to simplified, de-politicized, oppressive hegemonic discourses as well

as the embodiment of a praxis of disruption of binary epistemological, methodological, and

ontological borders (Anzaldúa, 1987). Reflection on my work thus far represents a small

contribution to the “cross-disciplinary moves… referred to as bricolage” (Kinchloe, McLaren, &

Steinberg, 2011, p. 164). My counter-conduct as counter-narrative lies in the disruption of

hegemonic masculinity and reflection on the border spaces I have encountered through this work.

Critical Qualitative Research as Critical Pedagogy

We teachers, then, need to be in transition, in motion, works in progress. We become students of our students, in part to understand them, in part to know ourselves…. Becoming students of our students, we expand and enlarge ourselves. (Ayers, 2010, p. 157) All serious and original thinking is ultimately revolutionary—revolutionary in a broader than political sense. And so to become more thoughtfully or attentively aware of aspects of human life which hitherto were merely glossed over or taken-for-granted will more likely bring us to the edge of speaking up, speaking out, or decisively acting in social situations that ask for such action. … It is on the basis of understanding what serves the human good of this child, or these children in need, that one may engage in collective political action. (van Manen, 1990, p. 154) Ayers (2010) makes visible the importance of understanding the self in relationship with

those with whom we work, and he encourages us to position ourselves as Freire’s (2009)

teachers-students who learn from our students-teachers in a more democratic and socially just

learning community. van Manen (1990) similarly notes that learning from our research opens an

awareness to aspects of human experience that we simply accept and to which we remain un-

attentive because they appear to be commonsense. Ayers (2010) and van Manen (1990), like

Anzaldúa (1987), beckon us to the difficult emotional labor of learning about ourselves and

others through our research as well as holding spaces through which we as researchers and those

with whom we work might develop a more critically compassionate understanding of the social,

cultural, and political contexts in which lived experiences of myriad phenomena have formed. Of

course we do research to teach the world about our methods and our findings. Yet reflection on

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my experience as a qualitative researcher in education affords me a glimpse of another facet in

the role of research as a pedagogical act—creating spaces in which to foster a sense of voice and

praxis (Freire, 2009) for all involved in the research process through which we engage more

meaningfully, compassionately, and with a sense of critical humility with the world.

A praxis of critical research as an act of critical pedagogy lies in the presentation of

bricolage as “an emancipatory research construct” reflective of “an evolving criticality in

research” (Kincheloe, et al., 2011). Importantly, various methodological perspectives combine

with myriad philosophical traditions to “move beyond the blinders” of disciplinary particularity

toward, in my understanding, more democratic, dare I say egalitarian, forms of knowledge

production and indeed ways of knowing (Kincheloe, et al., 2011, p. 168). Crucial to embracing

an inclusive research-as-pedagogy paradigm includes valuing Indigenous traditions (Tuhiwai

Smith, 2012; Kovach, 2009; Chilisa, 2012) and what Connell (2007) calls Southern Theory,

which includes knowledge traditions outside Western, Northern epistemologies. Operating from

an advocacy-participatory position (Creswell, 2007), research as a pedagogical act is imbued

with “an action agenda for reform that may change the lives of participants, the institutions in

which they live and work, or even the researchers’ lives” (p. 21). This research-as-pedagogy

orientation embraces the complexities, tensions, and paradoxes of which Anzaldúa (1987) has

written as well as the “complications of power” inherent in understanding complex social

phenomena (Kincheloe, et al., 2011). And perhaps research as a pedagogical act in itself holds

within it its own curriculum and pedagogy for us as social researchers as we lean “toward the

discomfort of life” (Chödrön, 1997, p. 17) to learn how best to work serve myriad communities

through our research.

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As a teacher and a critical qualitative education researcher, I find great resonance in

Ayers’ (2010) invitation to become “students of our students” (p. 157). Of critical importance to

Ayers (2010) is developing an evolutionary understanding of ourselves as teacher/scholars in

order to understand and serve the children and communities with whom we work. Therefore a

second, often painful border space highlighted in my research lies in the necessity to remain

critically aware of the complexity of identity, positionality, and reflexivity. Sadly, this crucial

critical disposition associated with teacher education has suffered terribly under the pressures of

audit culture (Taubman, 2009; Giroux, 2014), which comprises aspects of governmentality such

as the obsession with standardized curricula, teaching, and assessment of students and teachers,

data collection, and the reframing of education as little more than workforce development.

Identity, Positionality, Reflexivity

A major aspect of my own learning in the context of both teaching and education

research lies in the awareness of my privilege as a White, straight, middle-class, educated

American man and how my complex identity and privilege position me in my teaching and

research. Reflecting on my work in masculinities research and as a teacher has opened a space of

critical reflection on my identity, positionality and privilege. An important learning from my

experience lies in my privilege as a White man, a member of the dominant culture for whom all

the social institutions have been built, to choose when, where, how, or whether to enter those

cultural liminal spaces either physically, intellectually, or emotionally. My journey to understand

my positionality has been a reckoning of sorts, consistent with the nautical term of determining a

ship’s position as it sails toward a never-ending horizon. Conceptualizing positionality as an act

of navigation renders Gadamer’s (2004) “horizon” metaphor particularly salient in understanding

my situatedness in the world and in relationship with others:

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We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits

the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of

“horizon.” The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen

from a particular vantage point. … A person who has an horizon knows the relative

significance of everything within this horizon whether it is near or far, great or small.

(pp. 301-302)

Calculating my positionality, my situatedness, relative to my, shifting, intersected identity

juxtaposed with a complex social, political, and historical context has required expanding my

horizon in terms of broadening my cultural frame of reference through encountering cultural

disequilibrium. As Schwandt (1999) writes, “when we seek to understand what others are doing

and saying, we are always standing in this in-between of familiarity and strangeness” (p. 458).

Like Ayers (2010), understanding both the other and myself and establishing a true human bond

has required:

full acknowledgement that as interpreters we are situated within a tradition. It is only

from such a posture that an interpreter can experience the Other truly as an Other and not

overlook his or her claim, but let them really say something to us. (p. 458)

In the hermeneutic tradition (Gadamer, 2004, Ricoeur, 1981), my understanding of my

identity and positionality as a researcher, teacher, and human being evolves through a contingent,

unfixed, process of building relationships through which to see the relative significance of

everything as seen from a particular vantage point while acknowledging and valuing the vantage

point of the Other so as not to overlook the Other’s claims and to hear the Other. Understanding

my identity and positionality has required mindfulness of reflexivity, the assumption that

researchers are in complex relationship with the social worlds they study:

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The researcher is the instrument of the research, and the research relationships are the

means by which the research gets done. These relationships have an effect not only on the

participants in your study, but also on you, as both researcher and human being.

(Maxwell, 2005, p. 83)

As an instrument of research, my long evolutionary understanding of my identity and

positionality has emerged and continues to develop as I engage with different communities. In

my masculinities research with young men, I have critically reflected on how my complex

identity has impacted others. For example, in working with much younger men and boys, I have

had to remain mindful that aspects of my identity such as my age and professional role as a

teacher and researcher can establish or perpetuate hierarchies that impact the levels of trust in the

relationships that I seek to build with my participants. This is true of my racial privilege, gender

performance, and sexual orientation in the context of working with communities of color, young

persons who counter-perform their gender, and gay young men. I have had to ask myself how I

may be affecting these young people and how my limited frames of reference might impact my

interpretive moves. My relationship with myself in terms of critical self-reflection on my identity

and positionality has been a long process, and my work with young men has often taken me back

to my youth in search of understanding as this story helps illustrate.

Flashback to the Marines

A friend once asked me about my experience with race. After thinking about it I replied

that it has been a long and evolutionary process for me. I suppose my experience in the Marines

as a young man might serve as the starting point in that long journey. I enlisted in the Marines at

age 17 with my father’s blessing. My father had served in the Navy during the early years of

Vietnam, and his father and uncle were both killed serving in the Navy during World War II. It

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seemed to me that military service was expected, and my father never countenanced any

discussion of whether or not I wanted to serve. My service, from the moment I arrived in San

Diego for boot camp, brought into sharp focus a disciplinary system based on punishment

through physical violence, denigration of anything associated with femininity, and humiliation.

That hyper-masculine system of fear and shame (Brown, 2012) served as both a bonding

community based on a common experience of struggle, which many of the young men with

whom I experienced basic training failed to survive. I suppose I had been living under the

practices of that governmental system (Foucault, 1978/1991) all my life, but the Marine Corps

made that the Panoptic system clearly visible. The Marines represents a study in biopower

(Foucault, 1990) through the embodiment of practices and beliefs that produced self-regulating

subjects, parts of a whole. Every movement and action was timed, measured, or judged in some

way. We were always watched, and that surveillance served as a powerful tool of control. The

photographs in Figure 1 represent different Marine personae, perhaps who I am, who I feared to

be, who I pretended to be.

Figure 1. Me in the Marines circa the early and mid-1980s.

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Yet that formative experience of an exclusive all-male bonding community was also a

formative experience in a community that bridged other aspects of identity. Issues such sexual

orientation, racism, and poverty become increasingly visible in my understanding of masculinity.

As a young, straight, white male, I never felt compelled to worry about or deal with issues of

race, sexual orientation, and poverty. Those were things that Others had to worry about. Yet as I

lived in a squad bay with 100 other young Marines, many of whom were young men of color

who had joined the military because they viewed it as their only opportunity to escape poverty, I

had to deal with race and poverty. Over time, the 1988 death of my Uncle Kevin, a closeted gay

man, from AIDS, sexual orientation, heterosexism, and homophobia directly confronted me. As

a high school teacher of English language learners in the Washington, DC area, I confronted my

privilege as well as the assumptions, biases, and prejudices deployed against my students by

many of my fellow teachers. As an education researcher, I have had to remain mindful of my

shifting identity and how my assumptions and cultural frames of reference position me in

relationship with all those with whom I work.

Conceptualizing qualitative research as an act of critical pedagogy, always mindful of my

positionality, illustrates the complexity inherent in qualitative social research, where designs and

even research questions and data collection can evolve through the course of the research based

on what we learn through from our participants. This critical fluidity can emancipate our

research from borders that traditionally demarcate, name, and perhaps even essentialize our

research methods. In that spirit, I move to the final border space: representation.

Representation of Lived Experience

Without proclaiming a canonical and singular method, the critical bricolage allows the researcher to become participant and the participant to become researcher. (Kincheloe, et al., 2011, p. 173)

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Methodologically, I am interested in understanding lived experience of important social

phenomena. In this case, my questions lie in negotiating an understanding of how a group of

young men experience and understand their masculinities in the context of American masculine

culture. Yet as I embarked on that work and realized the role of my subjectivity, my situatedness

in the phenomenon, I realized that what began as an interpretive, hermeneutic phenomenological

study had entered a border space in which hermeneutic phenomenonolgy coexists with

autoethnographic research. I have and am experiencing the negotiation of American masculine

culture and making meaning of my lived experiences of my masculinities just as my participants

are. Thinking about how to study the lived experience of phenomena while honoring and

accounting for my subjective position and experience, I find that my critical bricolage finds

expression in the method of currere from curriculum theory (Pinar, 2012). Particularly salient to

critical qualitative research conceptualized as or influenced by currere are the elements of

subjectivity and complexity, which Pinar (2012) considers crucial for education, and in my use

of currere in the context of critical qualitative research, to “speak, for it to become concrete, to

become actual.”

The de-essentialized research process through which subjective complexity becomes real

and speaks, is, therefore, a form or curriculum and pedagogy represented in my case through

blurring methodological borders and inter-textuality in representing lived experience. For

example, Ricoeur (1981) illustrates that all lived experience can be represented as text. That text

can take many forms, and my use of imagery as text overlaid with written text representing oral

story can provide a powerful option for participatory qualitative research, diminish hierarchies,

and democratize the production of knowledge and ways of knowing.

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My work, therefore, illustrates critical bricolage, qualitative research as an act of critical

pedagogy, in weaving counter-hegemonic narratives of counter-conduct.

What’s love got to do with it?

So what might non-canonical research as a pedagogical act, imbued with complexity,

tension, paradox, and the negotiation of border spaces between strangeness and familiarity look

like? Using methods such as phenomenological conversations (Seidman, 2006), interpretive

autoethnographic writing (Denzin, 2014), and visual participatory methods (Gubrium & Harper,

2013; Blackbeard & Lindegger, 2007), which include manipulated digital imagery, I offer the

following example. This work investigates the phenomenon of American masculinity through a

collaborative interpretive hermeneutic process of understanding lived experience in cultural

context.

***

I had spent months discussing masculinity with a group of young men. While swimming

in a sea of stories and photographs, I enjoyed listening to music, taking a few breaks to play

Angry Birds, checking Facebook and my e-mail, and answering texts. Social media helped me

remain connected with my friends as I immersed myself in my research. I sifted through digital

photographs and transcripts in which phrases like “true friends,” “he cared that much,” “sitting

together as a family,” and “having friends made me feel like it was okay” stood boldly on the

pages. Something seemingly ineffable swirled in the ether of our stories and crystalized into a

recurrent theme: love. We were all aware of the expectations associated with American

masculine culture. In relationship, we characterized the big story of American masculinity as a

narrative of fear—fear of vulnerability, weakness, of being perceived as “gay,” of showing our

authentic selves. Yet despite its ubiquity, that master narrative failed to resonate with our lived

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experiences, and our collection of little stories of relationship form a counter-narrative to a

classed, raced, sexualized ethos of rugged, stoic, individualism.

Figure 2. Staying connected through the sometimes lonely research process.

“I Totally Value Human-to-Human-Interaction.”

I met with Tony at his school four times over the course of about a month. During our

first conversation, he told me a story about friendship and how difficult he found it to be

“authentic” around others, which helped me understand my own masculine experience:

I think the most masculine experience of my life is my friendship with this other guy. I

have a really good friend, and, I mean, it's not one experience. It's pretty much a series of

experiences. … Whenever we see each other like on Skype, or on Facebook, or, you

know, in real-life, we always have awesome conversations, and I don't think we have

boundaries anymore … it's really awesome to get to know another person and really see

that this other person understands you. … And I think that's the experience that defines

me as a young man because I think to a certain level we all play in life. … I think it's

really important to be honest in life and be who you are, but you're never gonna be fully

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yourself in front of other people whereas with him I'm always fully myself. There isn't a

single thing that I'm hiding from him. So I think that's the most powerful experience that

would describe who I am as young man because with him I'm always me.

Figure 3. Tony’s iPhone: a tool for maintaining human-to-human connection.

Tony’s photograph of his iPhone in Figure 3 is overlaid with words and phrases chosen

from our conversations. He talked about how he uses technology to maintain his personal

relationships with friends, many of whom are in Europe, where Tony is originally from, and I

realized that I had used social media during the sometimes lonely research process to maintain a

sense of connectedness and relationship as well. Reflecting on Tony’s words about how “we all

play in life” and his photograph, I find it uncanny that I happened to be reading Niobe Way’s

(2011) Deep Secrets as I wrestled to make sense of our experiences. Way (2011), who followed a

group of young men through elementary, middle, and high school as they developed their

understanding of masculinity, concludes: “we live in a culture where core human capacities such

as emotional expression, responsiveness, empathy, and needs such as intimate friendships are

given a sex (i.e., girl) and a sexuality (i.e., gay)” (p. 29). Elsewhere in our conversations, Tony

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referenced young men’s fears of being labeled “gay” if seen spending too much time with other

guys. Yet his little story of his relationship with his best friend and they ways in which they stay

connected is a counter-narrative of connection and vulnerability. It is, as Harry Stack Sullivan

(1997) wrote about “chumship,” a story of love.

Connecting With My Friends Validates My Existence

Sitting one cold December evening with Chris, he repeatedly referred to his social life

and the importance of his friendships, particularly as he came out in middle school. His photos in

Figures 4 and 5, overlaid with phrases and poetry, stood out in the context of this work. Chris

explained his photo in Figure 4:

I'm always on Facebook all the time, which is again me trying to connect with my friends.

I like to feel like I'm helping other people enjoy their lives more I guess, and, like,

validating my existence … Each person is so different, and you learn so many things from

different people, and it's like a new adventure—each person.

Figure 4. “I’m always on Facebook, which is again me trying to connect with my friends.”

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Chris’s laptop and social media are important in maintaining his relationships. I again

found that despite the difference in our ages, we felt so similarly about keeping in contact with

the people most important in our lives. Yet, like Tony, Chris, in communicating a sense of

connection and validation from helping his friends enjoy their lives, also clearly preferred to be

with people in physical space and used virtual spaces to make those face-to-face meetings

happen:

My relationships with people are really important to me. … It's nice to text people, but I

definitely use it to plan seeing people, which is more important.

Revisiting of my conversations with these young men, I noted emerging themes,

questions, and how what they shared resonated with my lived experience. As I reflected on

Chris’s descriptions of his photos, I saw my connections with others, and I saw my own story in

his. I was a student in this work, and as all the young men reconstructed their experiences and

told their stories, I could see that they were, in a hermeneutic way, interpreting and making

meaning of those experiences as they related them with me.

Figure 5. “I’m always connected to all my friends all the time.”

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And back to love. Reflecting on my relationships with my co-researchers, a new horizon

has opened before me. Like my co-researchers, I negotiate my understanding of my masculinities

in the context of the big story of American masculine culture. Thinking about how to represent

my understanding of my lived experience juxtaposed with my co-researchers’ experiences, our

relationship both bound our stories together and also liberated them. A synthesis of my

experience lies in the screenshot in Figure 6 of a text message sent to me by my fiancée and my

response. After taking this screenshot I let my mind wander back through our relationship, and I

overlay the photo with my memories of our conversations, experiences, and feelings.

Figure 6. Memory, love, and gratitude.

So what does love have to do with it? Our stories are little stories of love, vulnerability,

relationship, connection, community, and of how we navigate the big story of American

masculine culture. We step into virtual worlds to stay connected, and emerge from the virtual

into the interpersonal human relationships with the people we love. Oliver’s photograph in figure

7 overlaid with a phrase he chose from our conversation about the photo reflects his desire to be

with his family every night. Oliver, who is Palestinian and Filipino, talked at length about the

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trauma of his parents difficult divorce, which has made him appreciate the time he spends daily

with his mother and sister.

Figure 7. Oliver’s dining room table.

Joël’s photograph in Figure 8 shows the edge of a Metro platform, which he relies on to

maintain his connection with friends and family. For Joël, the edge signifies his struggle to stay

connected with and satisfy those he loves and for whom he cares, yet he also confided that he

had thought of jumping from the platform. He craves connection and works hard to maintain it,

but he also fears losing those relationships, which he equates with loss, perhaps death. Joël, who

confided in me that he is an undocumented immigrant, which represents one layer of struggle he

has experienced, including his desire to go to college, as well as his father’s struggle with cancer.

At the time of our conversations, my father was battling the last stages of lung cancer, which

claimed him just a few months after I had met Joël.

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Figure 8. The edge of the Metro platform.

Through undertaking this work, I am slowly and imperfectly, developing the courage to

question my own assumptions, to let go of certitude, and through relationship to risk, to give to

others, to receive from others with gratitude, to truly live, and to truly be. My work, my life, are

works in progress through which I work to understand the relative significance of everything

within my horizon, near or far, great or small (Gadamer, 2004). This work has helped me expand

my horizons of experiential understanding of American masculine culture as well as the

complexity of doing the work of critical qualitative research as an act of critical pedagogy.

Scholarly Significance: Working and Being Restive

To work with a government implies neither subjection nor global acceptance. One can simultaneously work and be restive. I even think that the two go together. (Foucault as cited in Gordon, 1991, p. 46) This reflection represents my experience of both working and being restive within

academia’s governmental system, which exists in a larger system of governmental practice

produced through myriad socio-political discourses. Part of my restiveness lies in developing

understanding through research processes and relationships imbued with complexity, strangeness,

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and familiarity. Judith Butler (2005) notes Adriana Cavarero’s philosophical argument that “we

are beings who are, of necessity, exposed to one another in our vulnerability and singularity, and

that our political situation consists in part in learning how best to handle and to honor this

constant and necessary exposure” (pp. 31-32). Negotiation of the strange and familiar is vital to

our human connectedness and must be valued as we move through the world to develop

understanding of others and ourselves:

I exist in an important sense for you, and by virtue of you. … One can tell an

autobiography only to an other, and one can reference an “I” only in relation to a “you:”

without the “you,” my own story becomes impossible. (Butler, 2005, p. 32)

As participatory research, this work gives voice to counter-narratives of counter-conduct

contextualized in a normalizing, often oppressive gender regime and provides a space through

which the relational understanding of lived experience can emerge. My crossing into the

borderlands of complexity, paradox, and contradiction (Anzaldúa, 1987)—the “we” spaces—

compelled me to reflect on my positionality in my research, my teaching, and in the myriad

gendered spaces through which I move. In this work, I have been struck by how these young

men valued the opportunity to discuss crucial aspects of their identities and their lived experience.

As a teacher and a teacher educator, learning that these young men desired to engage in critical

conversations in safe spaces to think through their experiences and relationships as young men,

represents a teachable moment for me. Based on my learning, I have taken autoethnographic

writing back to my classroom in order to teach pre- and in-service teachers how to think

critically about their own complex identities and how their cultural frames of reference position

them in relation to the students and communities they serve.

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Autoethnographic representation through text and imagery offer the possibility of

complicating master narratives, connecting with our little stories, creating spaces to explore

ambiguity and paradox, and opening new horizons with no definitive end. Critical research as

critical pedagogy can “help qualitative researchers challenge dominant Western research

practices that are underwritten by a foundational epistemology and a claim to universally valid

knowledge at the expense of local, subjugated knowledges” (Kincheloe, et al., 2011, p. 172). The

power of critical qualitative research as an act of critical pedagogy lies in its potential as a form

of critical knowledge production and theorization based on lived experience, which may then

transcend the focus on the self toward a focus on complex, intersected, and often oppressive

governmental practices.

EMBODIMENT 23

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