Abstract
In this chapter, writing from the margins (Phillips & Bunda, Research Through, With, and as Storying. Routledge Focus, 2018), the researcher stories their auto-ethnographer’s individuated sensibility—their ethic of just-care—that informs their scholarship, research, advocacy, and activism. Drawing on critical autoethnographic methods they story their lived experience of being, belonging, and becoming. Methodologically, they write from an onto-epistemological (Barad, Kvinder Køn og Forskning, 1–2, 25–54, 2012a, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 23(3), 206–223, 2012b) third space (Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places, Blackwell, 1996), from which their authorial voice has emerged to unashamedly talk back. Through the use of journaling, visual re-presentations, and poetry, they work in an onto-epistemological third space they have created. Their emerging habitus requires of them both a cognitive and non-cognitive response (Hyland, Mindfulness and learning: Celebrating the affective dimension of education. Springer, 2011) to intersex human rights work. Their movement, within a western, patriarchal socio-political-medico landscape that subjugates knowledge/s and bodies, is a temporal and reflexively meditative response that engages the head (thinking), heart (feeling), and body (doing). Through this chapter, they share stories that give expression to their inward, outward, and forward iterative movement—that represents a movement away from exclusionary praxis ignorant of diversity and intersectionality (sex characteristics, gender, sexuality/ies, class, race, ethnicity, spirituality …). The chapter has a liberatory message and is important for interdisciplinary human rights scholarship, research, advocacy, and activism.
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Notes
- 1.
This ethic is about reading across and intersectionally on the topic of justice and care, bringing a contemporary posthumanist sensibility to ethics that share identity/ies and inform action.
- 2.
A fractal is an object whose parts, at any level of magnification, appear geometrically similar to the whole.
- 3.
This was a funded project that Early Childhood academics at Melbourne Polytechnic engaged in as part of thinking about social justice issues faced by the profession.
- 4.
I as personal pronoun but also the I for intersex. The first line is also a reference to Gabriel Filipi’s Poem Enter I* in Lum (2019b).
- 5.
My new word that I share with you—emerging as part of the process of writing this chapter. Connecting my ancestral mythical past to my present works. This is liberatory for me on many levels.
- 6.
The anti-bias approach advocated by Louise Derman-Sparks for over 50 years emphasises the need for social justice across education through the examination of personal and systemic biases that inform decision-making and practices in educational settings.
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Louise Responds
Louise Responds
Listen …
we come to know deeply who Agli is by listening to their story.
We would only know Agli’s story through their wilfulness to claim and assert their story across multiple contexts to make the path forward easier for queer identities.
Through Agli’s chapter, we deeply get to sense storying as embodied. We feel, as Poletta (2006) highlighted, sensations, emotions, and relationships in their storied realities.
Agli gifts us readers with rich understandings of inward, outward, and forward intersex movement work through beautifully crafted poetic storying, in which we feel their fear and pain, relief, and undeniable release of psychic energy. In these moments of feeling with Agli, we empathise, and so our support for collective movement is catalysed.
Agli has storied to claim voice for the silenced margins of intersex lived realities, through embodied relational meaning-making of storying—we catch our breath with them.
Their storying intersects their past and present experiences as living oral archives, we move with Agli to their childhood in Cyprus, to a sudden death, to medical pathologising, to working life, to parenthood, to their naked self through hupomnemata, to outward queering identity work and forward advocacy for intersex human rights.
Agli’s storying of inward, outward, and forward identity work gifts to collective ownership and authorship of the intersex rights movement understandings, his/her/their/stories, with hope, wisdom, and wonder.
The entirety and integrity of Agli’s storied chapter nourishes our thoughts, bodies, and souls as we are provoked to think through her scholarly and poetic dance with theory inviting rethinking of ethics and hupomnemata, be with their bodily experiences, feel the warmth of their gentle intimate sharing, and connect with and appreciate the wisdom and spirit of empathising with diverse ways of being.
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Zavros-Orr, A. (2023). Develo** an Individuated Sensibility at the Margins. In: Phillips, L.G., Bunda, T. (eds) Storying Social Movement/s. Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09667-9_7
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