Chapter 17: On Being an Outsider/Within: A Personal Narrative About Intersectional Reflexivity in Life and Research

I grew up in what sociologist Gloria Anzaldua (1987) called, the borderlands—the space between worlds. When a person resides in the borderlands, they are always outsiders inside a system to which they don’t fully belong. This experience produces some characteristic responses from most of us outsiders/within (Collins, 1991). In my experience, the most common and potentially powerful response to being an outsider/within is that it renders me a perpetual observer. Given that I can access these spaces to which I do not fully belong, I am privy to perspectives that many outsiders do not see. However, because I’m not fully an insider, my presence is paradoxically less visible and also under greater surveillance (Bell & Nkomo, 1999; Erskine & Bilimoria, 2019, Rabelo et al., 2021; Smith et al., 2019).