Spicing Up the Curriculum: “Straight-Talk” and “Thick Desire” in Zane’s Erotica Noir

• In Event: Roundtable Session 58
  In Roundtable Session: Sexuality, Gender, and Questioning the Normative in School and Curricular Contexts

Abstract

Welcome or not, Zane’s African American erotica is engaging adolescent readers, particularly African American, urban and female readers, in ways few official school texts do. This paper uses poststructural and queer theory as well as Michelle Fine and Sara McClelland’s (2005) conception of “thick desire” to map the unofficial curriculums Zane is offering young readers in a process I term queerscripting. Through close examination of her print and online media and interviews with secondary students, I look at how Zane ‘queers’ epistemologies of what constitute Blackness, femininity and sexualities particularly as envisioned through curricular and schooling discourses. Through these revisionings, I argue that she is filling in discourses of desire, race and power conspicuously absent from official school knowledges.

Author

• Alyssa D. Niccolini, Teachers College, Columbia University