The Physical and the Passable: Immigrant Anxiety, Fulbright Becoming, and the Invisible Trials of the Ordinary Body

This article adopts a response-able methodology that diffracts the author’s autoethnographic writings, composed while preparing a Fulbright application to the United States. Creative acts of responding open a material-dialogic space in which the self and its imagined other enter into fragile partnership across geographic and epistemic distances. By engaging literary works and leaving ambiguity intact, the practice advances a reparative approach to becoming, recasting Fulbright candidacy through inquiry that is both relational and culturally situated. The methodology foregrounds the affective and embodied dimensions of marginality, exposing the invisible weight of otherness. Through the metonym of “passing,” the article interrogates the moving body as a site of possibility and stalled transformation. In producing meta-discourse, it extends the sociology of the life course by conceptualizing immigrant anxiety as material, discursive, and socio-cultural force shaping transnational becoming.