“When My Hands Were Tied, You Were Able to Continue”

This paper discusses our experiences harnessing the complementarity of perspectives, positions, and resources as an outsider lead researcher and an insider research assistant while reporting a child abuse case that we learned of during qualitative case study research in Kenya. We use collaborative autoethnography to examine our experiences during the research process, with semi-structured individual interviews of each other and document analysis of our email correspondence. We provide a narrative of vulnerability regarding the complexity of reporting child abuse and offer recommendations on how researchers can navigate their limitations and strategically draw from insider-outsider partnerships when managing ethical challenges.

When “Even” Is Uneven

The main objective of this article is to provide a critical view, through autoethnographic inquiry, of one of the seemingly most innocent, popular, and “inclusive” public statements (and images) for welcoming/tolerating “outcasts.” More specifically, the article aims to demonstrate the marginalizing and power-assertive nature of seemingly “inclusive” statements. It points out how good intentions to be inclusive, when done carelessly, not only fail to lessen the distance between “us” and “them” but actually widen the gap between the two. Another objective of this article is to provide others who feel marginalized a way of thinking that might be helpful in dealing with such issues.

The Silent A

This critical autoethnography explores experiences as an asexual cismale and the inherent tensions and struggles experienced in the dialectic between societal expectations of sexual desire as a man and the lack of sex drive characteristic of an asexual orientation. It explores the exclusion asexuals experience, as they occupy a third space between straightness and queerness, leaving them nowhere in either the gender or sexuality roles spectrums to truly call home. As asexuals exist in a space not often considered by heterosexual and queer individuals and asexual men exist between the tension of sexual expectation and orientation, music is utilized as a means of common language. This essay offers this connection through a series of autoethnographic glimpses, each set to a different song or lyric, as a soundtrack to give voice to the silenced experiences of asexuals.