On Being at Home with Myself

Abstract

The author uses a metaphor of home to discuss and situate a way of being in and seeing/experiencing the world through a raced and gendered lens. She uses what she calls blackgirl autoethnography to talk about embodied, critical, and culturally situated research that begins (and/or) ends at home, in the bodies we live with, and the social circumstances we live through. Using sensory data and preliminary interviews with women she has shared “home” spaces with, she incorporates intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), cultural representation (Hall, 2003), endarkened epistemology (Dillard, 2000), and critical autoethnography (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015; Boylorn & Orbe, 2014; Madison, 2012) to argue for blackgirl autoethnography as a praxis for black and brown women to do the home/work of self-construction, absent the influences of racist, classist, and misogynistic culture.