On being amorphous: Autoethnography, genealogy, and a multiracial identity Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The article is a sociologically informed approach to understanding the authors 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 Americas 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 These data are systematically collected and analyzed field notes, historical documents, and the embedded interactions from within a larger culture of literature, scholarship, and popular understandings.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.

published proceedings

  • QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

author list (cited authors)

  • Gatson, S. N.

citation count

  • 31

complete list of authors

  • Gatson, SN

publication date

  • January 2003