For Nobody: Engaging Black Feminist Articulations of Nobody as Citizen, Political Praxis, and Pedagogy

• In Event: 75.042 - MTCC Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.042-1 - Producing Disciplined State Subjects: Intersectional Analyses of Race and Citizenship

Abstract

For Nobody, is inspired in part by the life, death, and performative acts of bestowing life, citizenship, rights, humanity through death to vulnerably marginalized individuals and communities. Specifically, the objective of this paper is to explore how Black youth constructed as queer subjects by state apparatuses, sociocultural institutions encounter, survive, and resist premature death (Cohen 2011). Responding specifically to the violent state sanctioned deaths of Black youth, this essay draws on Black feminist and queer of color pedagogies, epistemologies and theorizations to meditate on what forces create a national social curriculum/civic education, that requires, permits—through legal and extralegal means—and disseminates institutionally, the devaluation of Black life.

Excavating historic ruptures and loops, this paper explores the questions of when, where, and to whom is mattering conferred, at the intersections of Blackness and queerness. Using the data cases, of Freddie Gray, Mya Hall, and Korryn Gaines, I argue that the queerness of Blackness—Blackqueerness—configures an “im/possibility of subjectivity” (Stanley 2011, p. 107). To do so, I trace how ideas of the citizen/non-citizen, human/non-human are mapped queerly through the Black body. Moving through each case I further illustrate how citizenship is mapped upon the Black body and underscores the failures of single identity narratives which reduce issues of class, gender, gender variance and the accompanying performances of each to homoantagonistic or race based forms of violence.

Engaging with women and queer of color theory this paper interrogates how the queerness of Blackness works to erase certain subjects from contemporary political campaigns eliding claims the status option or protection of the citizen and/or human. Specifically, this paper, through the cases of recently slain Baltimoreans, Mya Hall, Korryn Gaines, and Freddie Gray, explores the question embedded in #BlackLivesMatter—do they, and which ones? Illustrating how discourses of difference structure and mediate value, this paper ultimately turns to Black queer feminist pedagogies to provide alternative narrative imagining more just possibilities.

Author

• Durell Maurice Callier, Miami University