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Chapter 2 broadens our understanding of Reconstruction to encompass the West and its “Chinese Question.” It builds upon the analytics for articulating racial difference—differential thinking—honed in U.S. race and ethnic studies to illuminate an early politics of comparative racialization. Chinese American activists and writers such as Wong Chin Foo and Yan Phou Lee struggled to disarticulate the powerfully racializing discourse of heathenism that helped sustain the dialectic of black inclusion/Chinese (and Native American) exclusion. Black writers such as James Williams and William H. Newby wrote against Chinese exclusion, representing it as an outgrowth of the racial proscriptions that they had faced during legalized slavery. In juxtaposing lesser-known figures from early African American and Asian American print histories, this chapter investigates the analogization of blacks and Chinese in popular discourse and how these writers negotiated and contested these homogenizing racial representations in oratory and print journalism.

The chapter deals with the language-Self link in the study of Arabic in the social world. For this purpose, the chapter investigates two sites in the authors’ linguistic behaviour as a teacher trainer in the Arabian Gulf region for the symbolic meanings these sites can. Central to this investigation is the concept of identity as a continuum which on one side is bounded by fixity and on the other by variability. The Self here is treated as a repertoire of roles, resources and attributes that are context-dependent. The material in this chapter is presented as an autoethnography. It is written in a first-person voice to reflect on the experiences of the researcher as researched subject, using memory, introspection, self-reports and personal interpretation to retrieve the data and explain them.

Chapter 1 further explores the author's subjective positioning and presents in more detail the methodological implications of his intimate, autoethnographic approach. It focuses on the strategic nature of this approach for understanding the emergence of the mobile orientations encompassing the subjectivities and mobilities of migrants, most of whom decide to sell sex in the short term in order to avoid being exploited in other labour sectors and to afford a better life for themselves and their families in the future. The chapter presents the notion of intimate autoethnography, which acknowledges the nature of knowledge production as co-constructed by intersubjective and affective relations between observing and observed subjects. It also presents the ways in which the complex conditions of agency of migrant sex workers can be obfuscated by sexual humanitarian, homophobic and other stigmatizing discourses emphasizing their vulnerability. Throughout the chapter the author provides examples of the ways in which he was able to engage affectively and intersubjectively with the preferred selfrepresentations offered by research participants. The chapter also reviews the data presented in the book as well as existing ethnographic research showing that the neo-abolitionist equation of migrant (and nonmigrant) sex work with trafficking does not match reality.

This chapter focuses on the way Chinese supernatural films pursue a kind of mythic autoethnography, where Chinese religious beliefs and superstitions receive an intensified makeover to emphasize the bizarre, the macabre, the mystical, and the inexplicable. It examines Bulletproof Monk's turn to fictitious Tibetan myths of immortality; Double Vision's cultic forms of Taoist beliefs; and The Myth's reworking of reincarnation and the semi-mythic story of the first Chinese emperor's obsession with the pill of immortality. It also analyzes the histrionics surrounding The Promise and its failure to be the film that it so anxiously aspires to be.

Opening with an autoethnographic extract detailing the end of the author’s English Channel swim, the chapter describes the sport of marathon swimming. It presents a working definition and a methodological account of the research on which the book is based. The chapter concludes with a summary of the chapters, highlighting the key arguments and concepts developed throughout the book.

In this chapter Cordi shares the value of what he calls deep listening. He states this is the first point of story. He then expresses how important it is to listen to experience. He shares that his identity changes when he reflects on when he is in the middle of being a storyteller and teacher. Writing is the way he responds to it, but not simply telling his story, but critically examining how his and his students narratives helps tell many stories.

Personal films made in the 1970s by white women, such as Joyce Chopra and Amalie Rothschild, have long been the subject of debate among feminist film scholars. Denied a literal and symbolic voice in patriarchal society, women passionately inscribed and folded themselves into the documentary material of culture and thus demanded and commanded space, permanence, and significance. Reading this group of films ethnographically, however, brings out a new discussion about the racial politics of second-wave feminist documentaries. This chapter argues that these documentaries reveal clues about the social formation of whiteness, which is produced primarily through the uncontested norms and privileges that define women’s personal experience and self-exploration.

This chapter explore matters of racial and ethnic difference and solidarity in films by white women and by women of color about communities of color. It argues that the films are most productively read as autoethnographies: studies of the mutual imbrication of selves and others, some individual and others collective, all of which are subject to the realities of gender, class, and race, albeit distinctly. In the context of political documentaries, just as in the conceptual battles over ethnography, matters of representation refract these tensions between inside and outside, self and other, us and them. Autoethnography is key to detecting the way women’s documentaries of the 1970s play a role in these ethical and political negotiations and the visions of justice they seek.

Chapter 5 is an autoethnographic account of author Breanna Mohr’s lived experiences working in a legal brothel. Initially choosing legal prostitution as an occupation when she was in her early twenties, she found brothel work as a way to have freedom to create her own schedule so she could devote more time to getting her undergraduate degree. Mohr discovered her passion for sex work research towards the end of her undergraduate degree and decided to pursue graduate school to continue her research. In this chapter, Mohr analyzes some critical incidents that have shaped her life in the brothel. She reveals the tension felt in negotiating a price for her services and how she grapples with deciding what monetary value is fair, what she deserves, and what she can get from the client. She also reflects on how taking ownership over her sex worker identity in academia has reduced the impact of shame from the societal stigma placed on legal prostitutes. Mohr tells her story with detail and a raw insider perspective of the industry. 

This chapter goes deeper into the naming of tricks and provides a firsthand account of the process of learning to skateboard from the author’s brother and key informant, Aaron Snyder, a former professional skateboarder. We also experience the author’s attempt to skateboard himself, which ends with a minor injury.

This chapter summarizes in brief an ethnography which demonstrates a close collaboration between the subject and researcher; the role one hip hop artist plays in a counterdiscourse to Christianity's conservative posture in Kenya; a methodological approach that blurs any assumed distance between object and subject; and the intersections, overlaps, and collaborations that have taken place in the life and work of Julius Owino—more famously known as Juliani—as an artist and the author's own as the ethnographer. This chapter provides the groundwork for later discussion by briefly examining the life and career of Juliani as well as his own relationship with the author, and by providing overviews of the major themes underpinning this volume as a whole—hip hop, youth culture, and Christianity.

Beginning with some of our keywords—authenticity, vernacular, and genre—and one folklorist’s crisis of belief, this opening chapter questions the folklorists’ investment in the tenets of folklore studies by looking behind the curtain of academic discourse to consider our belief in the language we use. Her argument rests on the seemingly simple claim that every mode of thought contains an element of faith. Here, Mullins seeks to peek behind the veil of our articles of faith.

Chapter 1 elaborates upon the relationship between the native intellectual’s vexed masculinity, analyzing reportage as a form of bodily knowledge indicative of the post-mandarin’s uncertain sexuality. The chapter focuses on Tam Lang and Thạch Lam’s writings on prostitution, a recurring theme in Vietnamese reportage. These native male chroniclers persistently gazed at commercial sex workers who were sexually intimate with European men. The prospects of such liaisons were threatening in so far as they gave Vietnamese women access to modern culture, while the male Vietnamese observers remained excluded from modernization, despite their active pursuit of modern knowledge. The chapter argues that reportage is not merely a case of the colonized subject writing back against the colonizer, but that it also points to the post-mandarin’s ambiguous masculinity and authorial predicament in the triangular relationship between the European male figure and the Vietnam sex worker.

This chapter is an autoethnography of the author’s relationship to superhero comics. His reflections are shaped by his experience of grief over the recent death of his mother. He attempts to find out what comics might have to say to him about death, aging, and mortality. He says that while comic books did not take away his pain, they helped him make meaning of it. He develops an understanding of why superheroes hold onto their grief, their rage, their anguish, and draw upon this as a source of strength.

This chapter by Kausar S. Khan draws continuities between her early research in unplanned settlements (katchi abadis) in Orangi, her activism in the Karachi’s Women’s Action Forum, and her academic research into the effects of structural, gendered and political violence on women and marginalized communities. She offers a moving account of the deaths of four friends in 2013. Khan writes using the first person, forcing the reader into an intimate, uncomfortable relation with the text, and the emotional landscape she engages. This compelling auto-ethnographic piece highlights the contradiction in experiences of loss and grief which are deeply unfathomable, compared with the need to crystallize their articulation in activist agendas. Thereby it comprises a view into violence’s lasting effects, ways research and activism co-constitute spaces of mourning, and the basis of a hardening desire to oppose violence by the means available.

Camming is the first book devoted solely to the erotic webcam industry, that empirically documents the history of the camming industry, the industry’s current size, the profitability of the camming industry, and that analyzes the motivations and the experiences of a relatively diverse sample of cam models. This chapter provides a brief background on the camming industry and discusses clients’ desire for embodied authenticity, and how interactive cam shows differ from traditional pornography. Given that many people view the consumption of virtual embodiment differently than they see the consumption of physical embodiment, and that these sexual interactions occur online, camming appeals to a wide range of workers and consumers. Importantly, these contextual elements create the conditions under which people open themselves up to experiencing new forms of pleasure, and in which workers can recapture pleasure as a fundamental part of their work. In addition to providing an overview of the industry, this chapter also outlines the analytical frameworks used throughout the book, which include the polymorphous paradigm of sex work and intersectionality. Finally, the critical pedagogies used in the book are described, which include progressive stacking, autoethnography, and a pornographic imagination.

This chapter examines some emergent forms of life writing that have recently gained prominence. These include the new-model national narrative; narratives of rights, testimony, incarceration, and reconciliation; embodiment stories of gender and sexuality, gastrography, and “conscious aging”; narratives of grief, mourning, and reparation; narratives of breakdown and breakthrough, illness, impairment, vulnerability, addiction, and recovery; autoethnography; ecobiography; and the celebrity self-advertisements of movie stars, sports heroes, and military leaders. This examination exposes how autobiographical acts take place at cultural sites where discourses intersect, conflict, and compete with one another, as narrators are pulled and tugged into complex and contradictory self-positionings through a performative dialogism. In these acts the terms of the narrator-audience relationship are renegotiated as writers and practitioners develop new rhetorics of identity and strategies of self-presentation for being heard as different subjects and subjects in difference.