Reparative Readings: Reclaiming Black Feminized Bodies as Sites of Pleasure and Possibilities in Diverse Democracies

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: Embodied Curriculum: Racialized, Gendered, and Confined Corporealities

Abstract

Diverse democracies should be judged by their attunement to those at their margins. In the western world, this is where black girls and women reside. Dominant discourses about black feminized bodies configure them/us as other (than human). How the body is produced through such discourses impinges upon the body as lived-in. In education, this means that dominant discourses may shape teachers’ practices in ways that wound black girls. Our paper inquires into the theorizing of black female subjectivities specific to curriculum. We use literary texts to interrupt dominant discourses by engaging in “reparative readings” (Sedgwick, 2003) of their black female protagonists, thus re-positioning these bodies as sites of pleasure and possibilities, and re-claiming the category of the human.

Authors

• Esther Oganda Ohito, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Teachers College, Columbia University