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 These data are systematically collected and analyzed field notes, historical documents, and the embedded interactions from within a larger culture of literature, scholarship, and popular understandings.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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