Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship (original) (raw)
Related papers
"It's not fiction, it's my life": LGBTQ+ youth of color and kinships in an urban school
Theory into practice, 2020
This article argues that chosen family structures are critical for LGBTQ+ youth of color. Further, it articulates the inherent sense of agency that is found in choosing a family-something that not only shapes young ways of being, knowing, and doing but impacts their ability to resist toxic cultural norms that all too often position students for the school-to-prison and school-to-coffin pipelines. Finally, this article argues that schools should attend more closely to chosen family structures and find ways to include them in school culture to better sustain students, classrooms, and communities of color. Davonte 1 : When I came out, I lost my family. Seriously, I lost them. I was kicked out. I had to build a new family. It was sad but also kind of cool because I got to pick the people who love me.
Queeruptions, Queer of Color Analysis, Radical Action and Education Reform: An Introduction
Equity & Excellence in Education, 2019
In this introduction, the author (guest editor) points to the five articles that comprise the symposium conversation on "queeruptions." The articles describe "queeruptions" by queer people of color (QPOC), specifically who are homeless, who work on 'zine projects, and/or who engage in student of color advocacy and popular education workshops. Each of the articles in the symposium offers examples of queeruptions that have the potential to radically transform education. Queeruptions are activist spaces where participants exchange information, network, and organize in order to make change and challenge mainstream society. We take the term queeruptions from an annual international grassroots festival that started in 1998 for alternative and radical queers (Brown, 2007). More broadly, through an adult education lens, queeruptions can be thought of as a radical form of informal education outside of the structured curriculum, similar to social movements, where participants organize as a means of critical consciousness-raising for social change (Biahar, 2010). The five articles in this symposium of Equity & Excellence in Education are the first to document and describe queeruptions by queer people of color (QPOC) and offer important considerations for formal education. The articles focus on the education between homeless youth, in community workshops, through collaboration on 'zine projects, and in student of color advocacy; each offers queeruptions that have the potential to radically transform curricula of formal education (Shlasko, 2005). The queeruptions that are illustrated in this symposium are notably based on queer of color analysis, which is grounded in queer of color epistemologies (McCready, 2013). For example, in 2016, the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter sent shockwaves across North America when they delayed the Toronto Pride Parade for 25 minutes in protest of violence against queer people of color by state-sponsored institutions (Ware, 2017). Drawing inspiration from this queeruption and others that challenge dominant norms and discourses within educational institutions, the articles will extend the theoretical and pedagogical work that began in a special issue of Curriculum Inquiry on queer of color epistemologies and knowledge production edited by myself and Ed Brockenbrough. Specifically, the articles in this symposium of Equity & Excellence in Education document non-formal and informal education grounded in queer of color epistemologies that oppose dominant norms within formal education spaces (i.e., schools and universities). Queeruptions, we argue, have implications for how schools and universities can be restructured to facilitate the thriving of queer students of color. In the following, I offer a brief summary of each article and how, together, they make a strong argument for recognizing the ways queeruptions by queer people of color can transform education. Sam Stiegler's article, "Under the Trees in Lincoln Center: Queer and Trans Homeless Youth Coming Together," explores the relationship of two homeless youth-one queer and one trans-as they pass time in public space between the opening hours of shelters and group homes. Drawing
A Double Life: Black Queer Youth Coming of Age in Divided Cities
This essay is a rare opportunity for me to reflect on this learning and draw implications for the kinds of postnational research and educational initiatives that are needed for queer youth from marginalized and racialized backgrounds, and more broadly, youth studies, urban studies, and sexuality studies.
We can learn to mother ourselves: The queer survival of Black feminism 1968-1996
2010
We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996 addresses the questions of mothering and survival from a queer, diasporic literary perspective, arguing that the literary practices of Black feminists Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith enable a counternarrative to a neoliberal logic that criminalizes Black mothering and the survival of Black people outside and after their utility to capital. Treating Audre Lorde and June Jordan as primary theorists of mothering and survival, and Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith as key literary historical figures in the queer manifestation of Black feminist modes of literary production, this dissertation uses previously unavailable archival material, and queer of color critique and critical Black diasporic theoretical approaches to create an intergenerative reading practice. An intergenerative reading practice interrupts the social reproduction of meaning and value across time, and places untimely literary moments and products in poetic relationship to each other in order to reveal the possibility of another meaning of life. Ultimately this dissertation functions as a sample narrative towards the alternate meaning of life that the poetic breaks of Black feminist literary production in the queer spaces of counter-cultural markets, classrooms, autonomous publishing collectives make possible, concluding that mothering is indeed a reflexive and queer way of reading the present in the service of a substantively different future in which our outlawed love survives.
A Critique of Neoliberalism with Fierceness: Queer Youth of Color Creating Dialogues of Resistance
Journal of Homosexuality, 2012
As a form of deregulated capitalism that has run amok, commodifying all that is in its path, and as a cultural means of commodifying Black and brown bodies, neoliberalism has taken a serious toll on the lives of working-class queer youth of color. Although it has hijacked spaces of cultural representation and material production, neoliberal capitalism is far from transparent. Through resistance, activism and performance queer youth of color have now started to shape a critique of oppressive structures, neoliberal policies, and pedagogical practices that are critical of their intersecting identities. This article examines neoliberalism's impact on education, focusing on educational policy and how these policies have affected queer youth of color in the urban centers of our major cities. This article also considers the contributions made by educators writing from the perspective of critical pedagogy in addressing the plight of queer youth of color in U.S. schools while employing the example of the dance group, Innovation, as way of addressing the havoc of neoliberalism in the lives of queer youth of color through performance and activism. This group has not only transformed notions of gender, race, class and sexuality that challenge major tenants of neoliberalism, but has also served as potent sites for the development of a critical pedagogy for working-class queer youth of color. Through sites of resistance rooted in progressive struggle, queer youth of color must be enabled by critical transformative intellectuals committed to encouraging youth to critically evaluate and challenge ideologies while displaying an allegiance to egalitarianism.
2019
Remaking Friendship in Unlikely Places: Queer-Decolonial Educators and Connections Across Experience, Politics, and Pedagogy Over the past decade, queer and trans advocacy has garnered increased attention in political, popular, and educational debates. The current prevailing models to explain and justify gender and sexual difference rely on understandings of selfhood that were developed in colonial, clinical, U.S., white, and middle-class cultural contexts. The cultural particularity of these most-accessible models has produced marginalization of queer and trans students and educators who have different understandings of gender and sexual difference. Queer-decolonial educators are individuals who are critical of colonial, Western understandings of gender, sexuality, and difference more broadly. These educators often work within contexts that do not allow them to draw explicitly upon the ways that personal experience, cultural legacy, and politicization shape pedagogy, which often limits abilities to connect with youth and students; conversely, these educators also often work outside of formal educational contexts, and thus, pedagogical approaches to teaching differences of gender and sexuality are often not well-documented nor institutionalized. Queer-decolonial educators work to understand the ways that diverse communities are receptive of, and resistant to, particular narratives of gender and sexual difference, often looking to legacies of legal, colonial, clinical, and social violence around gender and sexuality. The methodology and methods used for this study include iii community-accountable research and qualitative interviews inspired by queer-of-color and Indigenous feminisms. In-depth interviews were undertaken with six queerdecolonial educators who historicized and theorized life experiences, elaborating themes of movement across contexts, familiarity with violence, refusals of homogeneity, and responsibility to legacy, as well as pedagogical efforts towards multimodality and intersectionality. These six educators also described the importance of addressing queerphobia, transphobia, and decoloniality simultaneously in the interests of refusing the production gender and sexual normativity, and place such refusals within critiques of racism, xenophobia, and settler colonialism, each crediting Indigenous epistemologies or life practices as foundational to remaking just worlds. iv This dissertation, written under the direction of the candidate's dissertation committee and approved by the members of the committee, has been presented to and accepted by the Faculty of the School of Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education. The content and research methodologies presented in this work represent the work of the candidate alone.