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What might it mean to reimagine brown‐girl‐as‐failure to brown‐girl‐as‐success? This article draws on findings from an empirical research study of academically successful teenage girls from Aotearoa New Zealand. In this paper we focus on what it means to be an intelligent and successful young brown woman in the context of the contemporary white‐centering of meritocratic success, and the oppressive narrative that brown girls are not bright. Using a creative methodology, Laurel Richardson's collective storying and Patricia Leavy's fiction‐based research, the paper engages in forms of creative analytic practice and new knowledge representation, which prioritize authentic voice and understanding of the young women participants' lived experiences. Collective stories were used in the study to challenge existing public discourses of girls and success, including the white‐centering of such depictions, and to create narratives that participants could identify with, particularly those that were often unspoken but widely experienced. Using collective stories in the study offered a space of resonance with participants who could engage with the stories during the research process and contribute to their (re)storying. The interplay between the theoretics of methodological creativity and the symbolic violence of a colonial positioning of successful girlhood offers a novel contribution to girlhood studies. Through collective storying and a further interweaving of poetic voice, the disruption of the narrative of deficit offers remembering and revalidation of brown success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kapwa is a core Filipino value and refers to a sense of shared identity, beingwith-others, an inner self shared with others. It is a value that Filipinos are proud to embody as it signifies unity and supports collectivist ways of being. In this article, I problematise kapwa in relation to the queer other in the Filipino family and in community life. I consider how social strategies of silence, erasure and invisibility are used as ways of relating to the Filipinx queer other, which may instead serve to undermine the lived practice of kapwa. In doing so, this article will also explore the influence of Spanish Catholic colonisation on Filipinos' core values, such as in Filipino beliefs about queerness, leading to a syncretisation of precolonial kapwa with Catholic sociocultural doxa. I will then engage with precolonial Filipino understandings of queerness, Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Indigenous Filipino psychology), as I attempt to deconstruct erasure-as-kapwa as a primary way of dealing with the Filipinx queer other. Through an autoethnographic approach, which will include creative written vignettes interspersed with scholarly discussion, this article seeks to be a hopeful reinscription of kapwa to include queer Filipinx people in the shared self of a Filipino family and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]