This article examines the ways in which Sudanese Australian students from refugee backgrounds are often perceived in their high schools as transgressive, and how this transgression--perceived or real--may become for them a liberatory invitation for both students and teachers, and a means to a reconstruction of self, educational contexts, and freedom (hooks). Through discussion of the ethnocinematic research project "Cross-Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education," the author comments on the complexities of the performance of identity for teachers, researchers, and coparticipants across differences of age, race, sexuality, geography, and class.