This article proposes invading ethnography as reflexive practice that disrupts normative representations of gender and sexuality. Writing from the perspective of the queer of color, this reflexive practice plays on the idea of the ethnographic researcher as an alien entity that invades a social setting, thereby calling attention to ethnography’s colonial history. I model this practice by sharing an ethnographic narrative from my research with a Ghanaian community in Houston, Texas. Rather than contain reflexivity to a methodological appendix or footnote, invading ethnography strategically interrupts the ethnographic narrative to illustrate how normative assumptions about gender and sexuality not only shape the organization of social spaces, but also inform ethnographic possibilities. In so doing, this article performs a decolonial option by destabilizing the powerful position of the narrator through an interruption of the ethnographic narrative.

This article considers how race and sexuality mutually inform the ways women experience their sense of belonging in sport. An examination of how white and heterosexual privilege structure belonging for 15 women rugby players in the sport finds that the ways in which some players assert their belonging runs the risk of reifying oppressive norms associated with heterosexual femininity and white privilege. This analysis provides a nuanced understanding of how individual women may rely on certain structures of domination to take up space in sport in ways that rely on and reproduce inequality. Although women rugby players may challenge norms of (white) heterosexual femininity, they experience these norms as mediated through their particular social locations. As a result, how women rugby players take up space in sport may be complicated by their specific relationship to social constructions of gender, sexuality, and race.

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