Introduction: Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Research

This chapter explores an approach of teaching critical/autoethnography as an exercise in intersectionality and the ways in which the borders of identities bleed. The critical in critical autoethnography captures a moment in that borderless frame and holds it to a particular scrutiny intersplicing sociology-of-theself with a hermeneutics of theorizing the self. The notion of critical is an engagement of discernment of the meanings in any given situation with the potentials and possibilities of transformation. Madison's construction is applied to engaging a critical autoethnography, because it asks deep questions and demands rigorous considerations. With the framing of a critical autoethnography as intersectional praxis, the chapter shares the samples of student work in a junior level performance studies class. Each of the student efforts follows a form that might be described as a poetic autoethnography, both in the form of engagement as well as in that way in which poetry is a liquidity of emotion that fuses the politics of story and form.