Introduction

This chapter offers a short discussion of gender research, how authors arrived at autoethnographic inquiry in this moment, and a brief look at gender, intersectionality, and the importance of theorizing from the margins. Researching gender is necessarily complex, just as is it complex to live and embody gender. In a US context, gender, race, and ability are co-constitutive forces. Indeed, the United States is a colonized and settler state “founded” under the direction of Western imperial forces seeking to displace, destroy, and replace local and indigenous peoples, cultures, and cosmologies for the purpose of domination and expanding capital. Autoethnography is research, writing, storytelling, and a method that connects the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, political, and performance. An autoethnographer can establish intersectional praxis by addressing the four criteria for a rigorous autoethnography—narrative fidelity and cohesion, self-reflexivity, and connecting the personal to the political—via representational, structural, and political intersectionality respectively.