Invading ethnography: A queer of color reflexive practice

Abstract

This article proposes invading ethnography as reflexive practice that disrupts normative representations of gender and sexuality. Writing from the perspective of the queer of color, this reflexive practice plays on the idea of the ethnographic researcher as an alien entity that invades a social setting, thereby calling attention to ethnography’s colonial history. I model this practice by sharing an ethnographic narrative from my research with a Ghanaian community in Houston, Texas. Rather than contain reflexivity to a methodological appendix or footnote, invading ethnography strategically interrupts the ethnographic narrative to illustrate how normative assumptions about gender and sexuality not only shape the organization of social spaces, but also inform ethnographic possibilities. In so doing, this article performs a decolonial option by destabilizing the powerful position of the narrator through an interruption of the ethnographic narrative.