Blame It on Tyra: Race, Refugeity and Sexual Representation

This paper offers a performative autoethnography in order to make transparent-in-context relationships and research data arising from an ethnocinematic doctoral study entitled: "Cross-marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education". The performative structure of this paper reflects contemporary developments in qualitative and education research that acknowledge researchers/educators as gendered, sexualized, and racialized. From these subjectivities we engage in communities of practice in ways that are both intercultural and intergenerational and, as such, experimental performative narratives are increasingly considered to be both "reliable" data while simultaneously troubling notions of reliability. This paper explores these productive contradictions as they appeared to the educator-author at a Sudanese beauty pageant in Melbourne, Australia, and the implications for her own sense of race, refugeity and sexual identity that this scene evoked. This and other texts that are created to be spoken aloud are "performance ethnographies about self and society", and as such they blend layers of past and present in provocative ways. (Contains 2 notes.)