Blame it on Tyra: race, refugeity and sexual representation

Abstract

This paper offers a performative autoethnography in order to make transparent-incontext 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.'The Tyra Show' gives young women the girlfriend they want to hang out with, and the role model they need. (Warner Brothers 2010)

‘It gets narrower’: creative strategies for re-broadening queer peer education

“…More than anything, I wanted them to take the main message out of it, that everyone deserves respect and dignity. (Bert,18 years) Arts-based engagement has been documented and theorised as an effective leadership tool for young people, queer and otherwise (Harris 2012(Harris , 2013aJimenez 2009). The disruptive potential of queering the classroom through the 'bodies and words of [these] queer teachers and students' (172), Jimenez argues, remains high despite the proliferation of happiness and anti-bullying campaigns for schools and queer youth.…”