“Still you resist”: an autohistoria-teoria of a Vietnamese queer teacher to meditate, teach, and love in the Coatlicue state

Abstract

This piece will be walking, writing, meditating in in-between spaces with me. I call this act queer walking meditation, which blended autohistoria, the Coatlicue State, and meditation to examine my own queer self. This queer walking meditation helps me move between stories, initiates dialogues with a self, recognizes my self's confusion, and leads to a series of actions to fight against the struggles and complicatedness in my identities. As a result, I learned how to mediate and take actions for myself and with my students from the standpoint of a Vietnamese queer, accented, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teacher and Chicana-feminist writer. This walk witnesses the cathartic process through which I came to understand intersectional identities and how I used them into teaching, researching, and writing in a white gay world. I came up with another question, Is that the feeling of intersectionality?, at the end of this walk in order to open another walk in the future.

Keywords:

• Gloria Anzaldúa
• autohistoria-teoria
• meditation
• intersectionality
• ESOL

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ethan Trinh

Ethan Trinh is a genderqueer, graduate student pursuing a PhD in Middle and Secondary Education and a certificate at Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. Ethan's works focuses on the intersectionality of gender, race, and ESOL that embraces queerness as a healing teaching and research practice.