Confronting my many-hued self: An autoethnographic analysis of skin colour across multiple geographies

Our skin functions as ‘the unstable border between the body and its others’ (Ahmed, 1998: 27), serving as a crucial site through which social relations are constructed, including in ways that cause various kinds of discomfort. During fieldwork for two distinct research projects in and around my hometown, the South Indian city of Chennai, I was often forced to confront my ‘sanctioned ignorance’ (John 1996) of the many aspects of my own privilege, including the colour of my skin, that operated in that socio-spatial setting. However. upon returning to the UK, where I was pursuing a research degree, I found myself, as a South Asian woman, discursively changing colour; having abruptly become ‘Brown’, I was consequently faced with a qualitatively different form of discomfort. In this reflexive article, I grapple with my personal sense of dissonance while traversing these divergent spaces, where the multiplex renderings of my supposedly immutable skin colour marked me variously as ‘upper-’/Other. Building on existing scholarship within cultural and feminist geography, I utilise my own embodied experience to make a methodological argument about paying attention to the context-specific and deeply relational articulations of skin colour in race-related research and activism.