Rasquache vulnerability and theories of the flesh: Working through the flesh in (auto)ethnography as a site of disruption

Abstract In this article, I blend authoethnography and ethnography to activate a Chicanx feminist theory of the flesh, which is grounded in the sensibilities of vulnerability and rasquachismo. Rasquachismo is a politicized Mexican American visceral modality of being in the world—in art, in politics, in everydayness—that is rooted in purposeful defiance and historical hybridity. I apply this framework in conjunction with Weheliye's theory of enfleshment to write through two seemingly disparate ethnographic scenarios: the almost deadly hemorrhage of my uterus and the health injustice of my treatment and ethnographic work on racialized death in the overdose crisis in Washington, DC. I consider the theoretical and methodological interventions of practicing radical forms of vulnerability in our (auto)ethnographic writing and how this practice affirms connections between my enfleshment and the deep relationality to me as a scholar of necropolitics and unjust death. I demonstrate that this approach challenges current disciplinary norms of reflexivity as a “sufficient enough” form of ethical accountability in anthropology and reorients our theoretical lineages to be rooted in Black and Chicanx theories of the flesh that emphasize connective flesh that has been historically erased.