Breaking the Mould: Working through our Differences to Vocalize the Sound of Change

This paper orchestrates alterethnographical reflections in which we, women, polyphonically document, celebrate and vocalise the sound of change. This change is represented in Kamala Harris’s appointment as the first woman, woman of colour, and South Asian American as the US Vice President, breaking new boundaries of political leadership, and harvesting new gains for women in leadership and power more broadly. With feminist awareness and curiosity, we organise and mobilise individual texts into a multivocal paper as a way to write solidarity between women. Recognising our intersectional differences, and power differentials inherent in our different positions in academic hierarchies, we unite to write about our collective concerns regarding gendered, racialised, classed social relations. Coming together across intersectional differences in a writing community has been a vehicle to speak, relate, share, and voice our feelings and thoughts to document this historic moment and build a momentum to fulfil our hopes for social change. As feminists, we accept our responsibility to make this history written, rather than manipulated or erased, by breaking the mould in the form of multi-layered embodied texts to expand writing and doing research differently through re/writing otherness.