From abstraction to visceral inquiry: toward courageous spaces with reflexive autoethnography

We sit in the classroom with our first-year Human Sexuality doctoral students – Katharina in person and Manjot on Zoom. Up on the screen is displayed Sylvia Duckworth's (n.d.) Wheel of Power/Privilege, the Vanderwoerd's (2016) Web of Oppression, or a similar illustration that we often use to kickstart a conversation on intersectionality in sexuality. Our program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) is taught explicitly and intentionally through a lens of criticality and centers a scholar-practitioner model approach, both of which necessitate a reflexive unpacking of the ways intersectionality shapes the personal, professional, academic, relational experiences of the folks inside and outside this classroom. Departing from the objectivist binary and embracing the complicated multifaceted is not the intellectual arrival of this program but the very beginning point. Students are also taught to apply their knowledge to real-life issues and to think equity-centered. They are trained to recognize and consider the various intersecting structures of power and oppression, including ethnicity, race, gender, sex, class, age, ability, national origin, geographical and political location and religion. So a critical engagement with one's positionality within the complicated weave of sexualities surfaces in the very first class.

Katharina ponders…Students have read Crenshaw (1989) and Carastathis (2016) covering the concept of intersectionality for this class and are exposed to much more conceptual and empirical work through their degree program. I have seen students in previous courses learn to speak theory, to explain it, justify it, make it meaningful to research design, policy recommendations, educational structures, therapy sessions, etc. I am convinced these students in this classroom and those that will come after them, will also acquire this grammar. And yet, as I look at the screen and the abstract displays of identities and then over at our students who ought to critically learn and engage these concepts around sexualities, I am hit hard. My approach, right this moment, to intellectualize this concept among these people, many of whom have experienced complicated marginalizations throughout their own lives, feels inappropriate and not enough. In fact, it feels exclusionary. Maybe I feel so tender because all the while I am reflecting on my own continued stretch between my identities as a scholar, researcher, parent, partner, advocate, transnational, white woman living in a country that is not her own but that is becoming her children's. And maybe because the repercussions of an election year in the USA are reverberating so intensely through large parts of the world. And maybe it is the continued structural assault on Palestinian lives, land and safety...See, I can do the thing – I can think through the wheel of identities and the various forms of privilege that come with them in different contexts. I do the thinking and reasoning and so do my students.

But what does this feel like? How does it manifest deep inside of us? What memories and visions does it conjure? As a social-justice oriented teacher, how am I actually supporting our students to “do the thing” (Elias, 2024) looking at the abstract representation of intersectionality? While pedagogically and intellectually it is helpful to provide doctoral students with the framework to articulate the social, political, genealogical experiences around their and others' intersecting identities, it is simply just not enough.

Manjot ponders…Also contending and navigating this liminal space as an anthropologist, practitioner-scholar, partner and part of the Punjabi Sikh diaspora I bring different registers as my peers and educators. To move beyond this liminal space of uncertainty of the future and how to re-articulate our needs and wants as researchers seemed daunting, at first. I knew of the tensions such a space occupies: Who are you writing for? Who are you accountable to? How do you navigate being a part of the community but also outside of the community (outsider-in, insider-out, Minh-ha, 1989) through your scholarship of researching your own? There had to be some method in which reactions to such questions can be elucidated. There were raw details of our own lives that seeped into our research aspirations but yet we did not have the tools in which to recognize these feelings and lived experiences as valid scholarship. These were impetuses, not fully formed ideas and notions we had yet to unpack. This engagement between Katharina and Manjot attests to how a classroom can break down hierarchical structures to collaboratively engage across diverse perspectives within the classroom between the instructor and TA uncovering the depths of our scholarly desires to explore issues important to us but through the method of knowing why we were there, connected to these issues in the first place.

Our students are fully capable, intellectually guided human beings with a lifetime of experiential knowledge and lived experiences, with beautiful stories of complicated existences traversing between spaces of complying, resisting, being and becoming. Why is it not enough when we probe intersectionality through theoretical abstraction? Because we are quite literally sitting in an educational institution learning to critique systems of power while that very space contributes to the divide between, what Gramsci referred to as, traditional and organic intellectualism (Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2020; Fine et al., 2004). As Gramsci (1971) puts it in his Prison Notebooks, “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned” (p. 323). In a way, he reminds us that intellectuals have a role not just in critiquing power, but in reshaping it. But here's the catch: the very space where we are meant to critique these power structures – the educational institution we occupy – often reinforces the same inequities we are supposed to question. This is a paradox we cannot ignore: while we are encouraged to challenge the status quo, the institution itself is built upon structures that often uphold traditional forms of knowledge and authority that marginalize certain voices and challenge and complicate lived experiences. This contradiction raises a poignant question: can real transformation happen if the space meant for learning is complicit in the very systems we aim to critique?

Gramsci's critique underscores this tension – educational institutions, designed to challenge power, are often complicit in sustaining the systems we seek to dismantle (Freire, 1968/2005; Giroux, 1983/2025). This is palpable in our own institution. CIIS is known for its unique pedagogical philosophy of integral, transdisciplinary and transformative education that values all dimensions of human existence including the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, imaginal, somatic, creative, connective and sociocultural. Simultaneously, CIIS is situated (and competes) in a US higher education market significantly shaped by corporate culture (Giroux, 2002) and a celebration of and reliance on overachievement, hyperproductivity and individualism.

In this moment as we faced our students looking at the intersectional diagram and readying themselves to engage in a dialogue about their understandings of intersectionality, Katharina became acutely aware of the dangers of reproducing traditional intellectualism and missing an opportunity for visceral learning. Freire (1968/2005) describes educational dialogue informed by respect, faith, hope, humility, curiosity and “a profound love for the world and for people” (p. 89). Dialogue is dynamic (Norris & Sawyer, 2012), leaves room for tensions and uncertainty, intertwines thought with action and involves critical thinking–thinking that recognizes the inseparable connection between people and the world. Manjot guided students into a lively discussion on their various identities, how their social, professional and familial contexts shaped their lives and what had brought them to this graduate program. It was a beautiful exchange of lived experiences, part intellectual engagement, part personal sharing and getting to know each other. While we listened with great curiosity to the lively conversation in which students became more courageous in their sharing and critiques, Katharina noticed a persistent nagging feeling. A form of dialogue was still missing; a piece containing that additional bit of personal unfolding. But this could not be done in such a fast-paced back-and-forth conversation with others in the classroom. A space was needed in which one could feel safe and slow down to produce a reflective dialogue with oneself. A reflective dialogue that encouraged an engagement with one's own complexities, vulnerabilities and offering an opportunity to feel into the spaces that are too difficult to articulate in conversation with others. A dialogue that could produce a visceral learning opportunity for one's self.

Out of these observations and ponderings was created an assignment, inviting students to exemplify how intersectionality plays out in their personal lives within a sexualities context. One student's submission was particularly moving and Katharina decided to extend the call for intersectional narratives to all students in the Human Sexuality doctoral program at CIIS. Katharina and Manjot worked with 11 students to craft personal narratives engaging the concept of intersectionality with reflexivity and complexity. Students were encouraged to avoid intellectualizing the theory and instead to explore, challenge and illustrate the multilayeredness of their identities and lived experiences as these related to aspects of their sexualities. As Chang (2005) argues, moving beyond theoretical abstraction allows for a deeper engagement with the complexities of sexuality, fostering a more transformative and reflective pedagogical approach. We were therefore cautiously hopeful that the assignment, framed through a critical, autoethnographic lens, offers illuminating and impactful learning experiences. The writing was not to be a theoretical summary or an impassionate third-person text but instead a personal, engaging, illustrative narrative of the students' lives within the weaves of intersectionality.

The collective narratives in this special issue are illustrations of the breadth sexualities thought through intersectionality can take. There are some shared experiences between the authors, for example their status as graduate students in the Human Sexuality PhD program at CIIS; and yet there are many more that uniquely situate them. Some identify as first generation students, as people recovering from academic trauma, as caretakers, parents, artists, disabled, trans, queer, middle class, Latine, therapists, Black, kinky, multinational, survivors, disruptors, descendants and much more. The variety of topics that came forth from these scholars' narratives is as broad and expansive as the varieties of their identities. Therefore, we can merely sketch the scope of this special issue but cannot fully capture it. Some of the topics the scholars engage relate to:

1. Race, stereotypes, partnerships

2. Coming into one's queerness

3. BDSM and asexuality

4. Kinship, sexualized bodies and body transformations

5. Violence and trauma

6. Neuroqueerness

7. Familial and social expectations of sexuality

8. Sexed, raced, gendered sexualities

9. Sexualities around religious restrictions

10. Joy and resistance

The narratives capture the multilayeredness of the authors' identities mirroring the ways in which intersectionality occurs in the real-world. These topics are not exhaustive and reducing them to just these categorical descriptions would dismiss the complexities of their first-hand experiences and vulnerabilities. The authors have, however, provided keywords so that readers can more easily select topics that speak to them (see  Appendix).

When thinking about arranging the narratives for this issue, Katharina had been grappling with the clustering of stories in her mind, over and over and over again. Why was it so difficult to produce three or four subsections of stories to structure the issue? Were not those journal expectations? Was not that the guest editors' contribution, putting it all together by creating cohesion? How can this be so hard when it's so conventional?! Katharina thought to herself, feeling increasingly conflicted.

While en route to Patiala in Punjab, Manjot was on a WhatApp call with Katharina to discuss how to introduce and cluster these intersectional narratives students have worked to refine over the last year. Katharina, in the San Francisco East Bay had just put her kids to bed where she'd had plenty of time mulling over the organization of the special issue in the dark. And in the dark she remained and shared with Manjot, “I started to do the clusters and something just did not sit right. To be honest, I asked you to propose a clustering because I just couldn't. First I thought it was my inability to pull out a common thread from the narratives, but now it feels like there is a resistance.”

Manjot, amidst the heavy monsoon rains and all the early morning traffic, listened. Katharina got more animated, “I wrote out what topics stood out to me in the various narratives. As I was doing it, though, I thought ‘But this is just my interpretation, I'm missing so much richness and nuance.’ To cluster people's narratives into subchapters by magnifying certain lived experiences over others feels reductionist. And we–especially in our position as co-editors–should not dictate what salient identities come up for our authors through our own filtering of their stories.”

Katharina could hear the beeping on Manjot's end of the line, so she knew the call had not dropped. With flushed cheeks she continued into a full confession, “It feels quite violent to elevate certain topics and identities over others by highlighting them when we choose which stories go together best. Also, by providing readers with such an organization, aren't we changing the ways they will read and understand the texts in relation to each other? The authors are already doing the work of selecting contexts meaningful to them, “allowing and encouraging alternative readings and multiple interpretations” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 745) to their lived experiences as is typical in autoethnographic scholarship. And now, here we come with our academic seniority adding our own layer of meaning. It feels antithetical to the care with which we hold our authors, right?” Manjot added, “And our methodology! I would also argue that it’s not just about care, but about respecting their agency over their stories.”

Katharina agreed and asked Manjot to keep talking, “Actually, I thought the exercise of titling the narratives was the way in which we could provide the readers a glimpse into the content of the stories, especially since we collaboratively designed the titles with the students. That co-creation in our project is really central. I mean, the reader will always read the narratives through their own lived experiences and will give them a unique meaning this way, but I agree that it seems like an unnecessary overbearing layer if we organized them around a type of stilted cohesion. Let the stories speak for themselves, no need for abstraction or intellectualizing that takes away from the felt sense students communicate through their stories and the mental and emotive imagery they stir up in the reader.”

There was an audible exhale on both sides.

“Convention…,” Manjot huffed, “…that almost made Ellis and Bochner (2000) bow out of writing their chapter on autoethnography.”

“Right.”

“And since when are we conventional at CIIS?” Both chuckled in agreement.

Katharina's tone shifted as she continued, “But seriously, convention—this ‘normal’ way of structuring things—feels like it's at odds with the very core of what we're trying to do here. We're working with intersectional narratives and autoethnographic stories around people's sexual and queer identities, which resist easy categorization and require a level of complexity (Jones & Adams, 2016). If we impose a conventional structure on them, we risk reducing these rich, multifaceted voices into something that fits a mold. It's as if we're forcing a uniformity where diversity and nuance should reign.”

Manjot agreed emphatically. “Exactly. A conventional structure is limiting, especially for narratives that are about breaking down those very limits.”

“The way we ‘name’ these narratives, how we cluster and title them, is an act of power,” Katharina reflected aloud. “We're categorizing these diverse experiences in ways that may not align with how the authors themselves would interpret their stories. It's like we're imposing our lens on something already rich and complex. As Freire (1968/2005) would say, by ‘naming the world’ for our authors, we risk denying the fullness of their reality…” Katharina paused, considering this connection more deeply. “It's as though by structuring their narratives, we're limiting the ways in which their stories can be interpreted, much as Freire warns against in his work…”

As her words trailed off, Manjot chimed in, “Yes, precisely! We risk reducing the authors' experiences to a simplified version of what they've already carefully crafted. In this sense, we're not just labeling; we are framing how their world is seen and understood. We certainly don't want to overwrite our authors' worlds with our own perspectives. They should retain the agency to name their own experiences, to choose what's most salient to them, and how they want their stories to be understood. Perhaps this is why it's so difficult—by trying to impose a conventional structure, we might be undermining their autonomy and the very process of ‘naming their world.’”

There was now an expansive silence on both ends, which Katharina broke musing aloud, “In autoethnography, the scholars reflect on their own lived experiences in a way that honors both their own story and the stories of others (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), right? Similarly, we, as editors, must reflect on our role in shaping these narratives while remaining attuned to the richness of the authors' voices?”

Manjot nodded, eyes drifting out the taxi window, where darkness slowly made room for dawn, “Yepp… it sure is a delicate balance between reflection and respect.”

Manjot: “What is thinking with theory then? I heard you tell the students about using it in your work with women's childbirth experiences.”

Katharina: “Oh yes, that was my first time trying out this approach (Happel-Parkins & Azim, 2017). Alison and I had collected interview data on women's plans of an unmedicated birth for their first child, and after completing the traditional thematic analysis coding process, it left us both very unsatisfied and the ‘findings’ reductionist. There was so much more to query and understand, so we chose several theorists whose work helped us explore these unqueried spaces as we ‘work[ed] the same data chunks repeatedly’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011, p. 5). Plugging their theories into the data and vice versa, we could situate our research within Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) rhizomatic inquiry. Instead of reinforcing ‘and/or’ structures, the rhizome allows for an accumulation through the conjunction ‘and…and…and…’ of possibilities that produce ever more lines of flight through their nodal connections. Instead of a clear entry point into the childbirth data, this analytical approach highlights the entanglement and interconnecting points since the fabric of the rhizome ‘has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ (p. 25). So when we thought about our research within this poststructural inquiry, we were able to disrupt the harmful binary discourses that exist around childbirth, people's bodies, agency within the weaves of sociocultural norms and resistance. It also enabled an additive conjunction of questions on the topic of childbirth that had not yet been asked. What I particularly appreciated about Jackson and Mazzei's (2018) thinking with theory approach was the absence of a prescriptive style on how to think about data analysis. They instead guide scholars into using creativity and encourage a range of analytic practices. To me it honors the complexity with which we approach the data.”

Manjot: “I see. So how thinking with theory plays out for our students is that their plugging of intersectionality into their reflexive autoethnographic data and plugging that data back into intersectionality can illuminate thought and unthought nodes around their sexualities. Simultaneously, they open conversations around their complicated subjectivities within spaces of privilege and power. By creating narratives, ‘their accounts bring forth the very life which they speak’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2022, p. 2). Their creative writing can show how their interconnected identities come into being as always-already situated within systems of power and relationality (Crenshaw, 1991). And not just one aspect of their sexual identities but the and…and…and… of identities folks might not as readily relate to sexuality and, speaking of…these narratives can travel beyond the sexualities studies discipline! When the authors share their narratives with others, the conversations of all those complicated, unsettling spaces that an abstract Web of Oppression (Vanderwoerd's, 2016) can't capture, can resonate into other academic spaces, and perhaps even outside of it. As a doctoral candidate myself, I appreciate the prospects of this sort of critical pedagogy work doing more than just furthering discipline-specific discourse.”

Autoethnography as a methodological concept is a type of narrative inquiry, in which the scholars “write, interpret, and/or perform their own narratives about culturally significant experiences” (Chase, 2005, p. 660) by centering their interactions with themselves and others in the analysis. In contrast to traditional ethnographic research, autoethnographies often present as performance narratives that show rather than tell about culturally significant experiences of the individual or community. In written tradition, this methodology can be employed with various types and genres of writing, including fiction, memoir and history (Ellis et al., 2011). The authors in this special issue use their reflections of personal accounts to create thick, rich and layered literary imageries by engaging reflexivity as one of the foundational tenets of autoethnography. According to Archer (2010) reflexivity is a person's ability to assess and respond to their social context by examining their beliefs, values and identities introspectively and then act purposefully. So what the reader observes in these narratives are iterations of the authors' storied lives inclusive of the authors' interactions and positionalities within their specific social, political and historical situatedness.

What Manjot and Katharina noticed after reading the first student narrative and subsequently worked into our support of the other ten authors' storying was that these narratives did something. They were not merely a display of the authors' lived experiences. Through the intense critical engagement of the authors with the tensions and complexities of their lives, they'd produced evocative narrative writing that “fractures the boundaries that normally separate social sciences from literature” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 744). This writing style produces not only insightful stories but ones that are encouraging, inspiring, heart-warming and -breaking and transport myriad of other emotions the reader can relate to.

Several authors shared with us reflections on this project noting they had not realized they could (and were allowed) to write “that way” in academia. That it had been, albeit intense and laborious, a highly engaging and gratifying writing experience markedly different from the sanitized, objectivist academic knowledge production that dominates graduate school writing. That they, as authors, felt seen and heard and whole in ways they had not when using stylized writing practices that were clearly demarcated from literary writing. This reflexive engagement with their selves had evoked memories they could feel into and grasp as they unpacked the intensity of the moments. That they could sit with their vulnerabilities judgment-free and self-consciously and story the contexts through which their lives should be known to others without an illusive happy ending or a manufactured resolution to the dynamics or tensions in their lives. This autoethnographic framing not only provided a legitimate scholarly approach for presenting their lived experiences but also reinforced the validity, political significance and intellectual rigor of their personal narratives. That they felt themselves as legitimate scholars. That transformative power that Laurel Richardson has been underscoring in the various updates of her chapter on writing as a potent method of inquiry in the Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, including in the latest edition in collaboration with Richardson and St. Pierre (2018). Writing as thinking, analysis and “indeed a seductive and tangled method of discovery” (p. 1423), a discovery of the entangled self as becoming.

Aligned with the autoethnographic project to interrogate the personal within the social and political, so, too, do Richardson and St. Pierre postulate that in the written representation, “no textual staging is ever innocent” (p. 1412). Indeed, arguably, new scholars tapping this far into their own vulnerabilities “up close and personal” (p. 1420) within a discipline creates a courageous space.

Considering these “not-so-innocent” spaces, we want to urge you, the reader, to interrogate your own positionalities within the complex tapestry of intersectional existence. In what kind of role do you show up holding these narratives: sideline observer, witness, empath, colluder, co-conspirator,...? We extend to you an invitation to examine your own complicated life within the weaves of becoming sexed, gendered and raced. Do not intellectualize but ask yourself how your own life is “a story worth telling” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 735). What does the courageous space feel like to you?

Manjot's note, “We can't just address the reader directly!”

Katharina's response, “Says who? If this writing does something, then we should at least invite folks reading it to reflect on their own identities, values, and commitments.”

Manjot expands, “An invitation for the not-so-innocent reader into the courageous space.”

Katharina posits, “How about as co-constructor of the courageous space?”

Manjot responds, “So that means we all sit in “reflexivities of discomfort” as Wanda Pillow (2003) calls them – authors, readers and editors.

Katharina adds, “Yeah, fully immersed.”

There is an undeniable cultural censorship around issues of sexuality in the U.S., intensified in recent years by political efforts to circumscribe the legality and legitimacy of “permissible” sexualities as, for example, related to identity, sexual citizenship, partnerships, reproductive and sexual care. These cultural dynamics are not abstract but have been concretized in policy. Over the past five years, a concerted effort has occurred to restrict people's access to vital healthcare services, including contraception, abortion care and gender-affirming support for trans youth, to name a few.

Since the second inauguration of the U.S. President Donald Trump, this repression has escalated into a full-scale assault on people's agency, bodily autonomy and identities, enforced through a series of deliberate policy shifts, executive orders and legal interventions. Specifically, this administration has actively challenged and terminated all diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) initiatives by eliminating DEI preferencing (Executive Order No. 14151, 2025; Executive Order No. 14173, 2025a, b); reinforced rigid, out-dated, harmful binaries by officially recognizing only two sexes (Executive Order No. 14168, 2025); and engaged in sex-based discrimination by violating the rights to gender self-determination and self-expression (Executive Order No. 14168, 2025). The presidential administration has sacrificed freedoms and retracted privacy protections, particularly concerning gender-affirming care for trans youth and has dismantled non-discrimination protections for BIPoC and LGBTQ+ communities as well as those based on citizenship status, national origin, sex and religion (Executive Order No. 14190, 2025). Under the guise of “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” the administration is reducing complex identities to ideological threats, deliberately violating and erasing their lived experiences and coercing institutions of power into compliance and complicity with the state.

These steady political shifts have had a particularly chilling effect on educational spaces, where issues of sexuality, gender and identity are increasingly regulated. In educational settings, Herdt (2007) cautions of a “politics of moral panic” (p. 17) seeking to undermine expansive sexuality education. This form of politics is manifesting through an array of policies and legislative initiatives imposing censorship in schools, affecting curricula, teaching materials and language related to sexuality education (He et al., 2021). Simultaneously, amidst this repression, we also witness a vibrant tapestry of grassroots organizing, community engagement, celebrations and creative scholarship in resistance to these restrictive forces. This activism not only highlights the expansiveness of sexualities but also exposes the detrimental effects censorship can pose for people's lives. To hold the past, present and future complexities of all that encompasses sexualities is, then, indeed courageous.

As co-editors of this special issue, we are not outside these tensions. The messiness of lived experiences, combined with the fear of not doing justice to our co-authoring, is also reflected in how we are holding current political precarities. We also chose to interact with the blooming and the blossoming happening in communities taking head on such violations and compliance measures. How we make recognizable courageousness may change, but that does not mean resistances are not present. Hence, when there is political awareness, activism and social recognition in this way in the stories of our authors, then we are creating an accountable and respectful community. This requires responsibilities to focus our agency to acknowledge complex lived experiences as each of our own alongside the interwovenness of these experiences. Furthermore, our responsibility is to ask ourselves how we are interwoven into these experiences, with all the different positions and complicities we each bring.

Confronting the issues as they are unfolding, while also refusing to ignore the resistance and activism that is concurrently happening, is a clear example of how disillusionment is being responded to. Neither are we living in disillusions, nor are our authors becoming disillusioned (Gramsci, 1971). Their lives showcase how they are resisting dissimilar or adjacent issues exacerbated by these policies. There remains a vibrancy in how activism operates in their lives, reshaping power loudly and quietly, independently and collaboratively and in their own ways courageously.

Fueled by the urgency to resist cultural censorship around topics of sexuality, intersectional autoethnographic narratives offered a creative and queer lens (Jones & Adams, 2016) through which to explore themes of kinship, queerness, kink and other topics mentioned by the authors. As emphasized by Freire (1968/2005), educators must create course content and dialogue that are critical, holistic and expansive – in the context of sexualities this consideration is not an opportunity but a necessity. Doing so allows scholars to critically engage in the face of uncertainty, providing pathways to social change. While discussions of sexuality are often politically reduced to sexual activity, sex education, body parts, gender, or sexual orientation, the authors' works in this special issue illuminate the expansiveness of the concept through their narratives by creating emotive experiences inviting readers into the midst of their intimate reflections and lived experiences. Intersectional reflexivity lends meaning to the unfolding of narratives by making them relatable, even mundane, because they are reflective of our own everyday lives.

The crux of Freire's (1968/2005) call for critical pedagogy lies in engaging students with the world in a way that makes the abstract personal and the personal in meaningful ways universal. In this spirit, the authors' narratives go beyond merely intellectualizing theory, in which they create a space where sexuality, with all its nuances and complexities, is felt, experienced and embodied. This movement from doing to feeling mirrors the delicate balance we discussed in our reflection on structuring the narratives. Just as we recognized the dangers of imposing a conventional structure on the students' stories, so, too, do these narratives refuse to be merely abstract. They insist that the reader engage with them emotionally, not just intellectually.

This is where intersectional autoethnography, as a queer methodology, becomes particularly powerful. By refraining from imposing a rigid structure and allowing space for complex, lived experiences of individuals to unfold, it creates an opportunity for readers to feel, not just observe, the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and other aspects of identity. It also invites the readers into a space of self-interrogation, where they might reckon with their own positionalities, complicities and spaces of complexity and tension.

Lastly, the authors write from a not-so-innocent place when they “speak against, or provide alternatives to, dominant, taken-for-granted, and harmful cultural scripts, stories, and stereotypes” (Adams, Ellis, & Jones, 2017, p. 3). The combination of thinking with theory and intersectionality as theoretical frameworks and evocative autoethnography as the methodology produces more than doing, it produces feeling. Their reflective writing cultivates emotional connectedness (Lawton-Sticklor & Bielazcyc, 2021) in academia, a space not typically known to foster these kinds of connections.

For us, as co-editors of this special issue, we observed how the act of “naming the world,” as Freire (1968/2005) put it, carries immense responsibility, in respecting the agency of the authors whose stories are being told. The responsibility is then also extended to the reader, who holds the vulnerabilities, complexities and deep emotionality of the authors' lived experiences. In the end, these narratives invite us not only to witness but to feel the weight and depth of the worlds they share, especially in such a volatile political climate where sexual diversity and LGBTQ+ identities are increasingly silenced, erased and harmed. In the spirit of Freire's call for transformative education and Gramsci's critique of hegemonic power, these stories resist the forces that seek to marginalize them, offering a powerful act of naming and reclaiming that directly challenges the status quo and reimagines what it means to be seen and heard in the midst of and in spite of it all.

The process students undertook in this reflexive autoethnographic work began with doing the telling – students retold themselves stories of coming into their own sexuality, tracing impactful moments and interactions. Then, they were encouraged to do the doing – which required them to sway with intentionality into their reflexive autoethnographic data, using intersectionality to engage reflexively with how their identities were shaped within larger socio-cultural and historical contexts and systems of power and oppression. Then they swayed back to incorporating this reframed and re-negotiated understanding of their sexualities into their autoethnographic data. The fluid and organic transformation occurs by plugging intersectionality into lived experiences and plugging those back into the theory, thereby transforming the lived experiences into something new, meaningful, vibrant and relatable re-presented in a reflexive narrative.

As part of academia, it behooves us to keenly equip doctoral students to make sense of their own lived experiences, particularly in our nurturing of scholar-practitioners. In their scholarly inquiry students should be guided in finding themselves within the weaves of theories, methodologies and all other aspects of the research design. The act of creating a space for reflective dialogue collapses the boundaries often separating the lived from theory. This reflective dialogue exercise as an academic assignment sets up and guides the becoming of scholar-practitioners while they grapple with their own positionality within their academic fields and the broader world. It provides a co-creation of an energy that can ripple into the world beyond academia with the tools needed to think creatively and expansively.

We want to note that not every student is in a position to do this kind of work. Creating the “not-so-innocent space” takes courage and patience. It also takes a certain amount of privilege and security to tap into one's vulnerabilities. This can feel especially disconcerting in academic environments, which often reinforce a norm of “leaving the personal at the door” (Motherscholar Collective et al., 2021). Further, while this work can diversify students' and instructors' own contextual relationality, it is not without difficulty and requires deep emotional labor. Within a pedagogy of kindness, humility and invitation, such an emotional unfolding assignment could be attempted.

Last, written narratives are only one creative re-presentation of engaging reflexivity and complex entanglements of the human and more-than-human. Scholars are encouraged to explore whichever re-presentations stimulate their creative senses, such as other forms of creative writing (e.g., poetry, vignettes, screenplays), audio and visual media (e.g., photography, video montages, weaving), or a combination of various forms. Using creative outlets to represent human existence, particularly those that engage with complicated global political dynamics, allows us to produce expansive scholarship that is visceral, creative, relatable and deeply interconnected, thereby cultivating meaningful understandings of our world.

1. Dorian Head

“In My Skin: Navigating Dual Identities”.

Keywords: Religion, familial expectations, race, partnership.

1. DDS Dobson Smith

“Shadows to Spectrum: Reclaiming the Rich Tapestry of My Queer Identity”.

Keywords: Intersectionality, queer identity, internalized oppression, resilience.

1. Natashia Fuksman

“The Site of my Breasts: Intersectional Layers of Identities, Desire, and Being”.

Keywords: Body shame, breasts, female desire, feminism, objectification.

1. Hadyatou Diallo

“‘I See You!’ ‘Do You?’ An Interracial Story”.

Keywords: Intersectionality, fetishization, colorism, interracial relationship, motherhood.

1. Malesha Griffin

“Dating Between Worlds and Reclaiming My Self”.

Keywords: Race, stereotypes, relationships, respectability.

1. Margaux Kraemer

“Bone Deep: Storytelling as a Path to the Self”.

Keywords: Body image, familia, disability, neurodivergent, transformation.

1. Nijeria Jones

“The Interwoven Self: Understanding the Complex Tapestry of My Identity”.

Keywords: Intersectionality, stereotypes, abject bodies, Black women, queerness.

1. Courtney Johnson-Benson

“Shades of Belonging: My Identity in Black and White”.

Keywords: Hypersexualized, raced, trauma, resistance.

1. April Webber

“Fearing and Fighting for Space in the Bible Belt”.

Keywords: Religion and sexuality, embracing queerness, gendered expectations, resistance.

1. Colleen Schoenfeld

“Me of Many: A Pretty Epic Journey toward Self-Love”.

Keywords: Veteran, survivor, sexuality.

1. Draven Alexander

“The Playful Intersections of Gender and Sexual Fluidity”.

Keywords: Age play, power exchange, gender unmasking, inner child healing, exploration.