The Biopolitics of Privilege

Abstract

In this autoethnography, I negotiate my middle-class Whiteness in attempting to come to terms with my own (mis)understanding of, and role in, familial, socio-economic, and cultural hegemony. Through a series of vignettes, I seek to question my relationship with my father’s shadow—a relationship founded upon an invented “daddy” co-created by a collection of coaches, friends, cousins, teachers, researchers, my father, his father, and the present-day media. Specifically, I reflexively evaluate my privilege as a middle-class White male struggling to deal with the expectations of those around me, especially in childhood. By connecting stories of my Thanksgivings as child, undergraduate student, outsider, and married man, I provide a critical perspective into and interrogation of my at-times messy maturation into a particular gendered and classed subject position.