ABSTRACT
Echoing June Jordan’s essay Report from the Bahamas 1982 (2003) on intersecting identifications and privileges around gender, race, and class, this chapter reveals the author’s desire and will to confront and come to terms with her experiences of precarity in relation to her privileges through affective, vulnerable writing. Weaving together scenes of precarity she has encountered, the author reflects on the borders of race, gender, and class magnified by shifts in identifications. She parallels her own experiences of precarity as a white Estonian woman working in Scandinavian academia with coming to consciousness with her witnessing of the bridging of difference between her personal experiences and those of her Black Jamaican partner and the imagined wife of a Black South African stranger she met on a research trip, battling their own struggles with precarity. Through creative non-fiction, jarring in between moments are focused, when the author is both produced as precarious and implicated in structures of privilege. Making these moments visible that she is often tempted to bracket, this chapter highlights struggles to write precarity from the position of relative privilege and makes a case for mobilizing affect as an embodied, geo-corporeal tool through which to unpack ethical demands of knowledge production.
