The personal is political. Racialized women and the autoethnographic method in pedagogy

Abstract

As a method of embodiment and a transformative approach to intercultural and gender perspectives, autoethnography combines critical reflexivity and intersectionality with decolonial struggle. It is a political act that serves a pedagogy of social justice. Merging personal experience (autós) with cultural analysis (éthnos) through narrative (graphḗ), this approach transforms subjectivity into an engaged epistemic and political resource. Examining the writing practices of bell hooks, Sandy Grande, and Catalina Montenegro González, this study emphasises the use of self-narration to expose structural racism and oppression. hooks proposes that the margins are a space of radical openness and resistance, enabling personal and political recovery while combatting silencing. Montenegro González uses autoethnography to unlearn standardised Western education, celebrating situated and relational Mapuche indigenous knowledge, while also critiquing the role of patriarchy in education. Grande critiques the university as a colonial apparatus through the concept of refusal rejecting recognition politics that fail to alter power structures. She advocates co-resistance that transcends individualist imperatives. Through these women’s experiences, autoethnography emerges as a tool for social justice and the generation of transformative, embodied knowledge.