This paper offers a performative autoethnography in order to make transparent-incontext
relationships and research data arising from an ethnocinematic doctoral study
entitled: ‘Cross-marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education’. The
performative structure of this paper reflects contemporary developments in qualitative
and education research that acknowledge researchers/educators as gendered, sexualized,
and racialized. From these subjectivities we engage in communities of practice in ways
that are both intercultural and intergenerational and, as such, experimental performative
narratives are increasingly considered to be both ‘reliable’ data while simultaneously
troubling notions of reliability. This paper explores these productive contradictions as
they appeared to the educator-author at a Sudanese beauty pageant in Melbourne,
Australia, and the implications for her own sense of race, refugeity and sexual identity
that this scene evoked. This and other texts that are created to be spoken aloud are
‘performance ethnographies about self and society’, and as such they blend layers of past
and present in provocative ways.