Writing Our Daughters' Bodies: Naming the Doing in Black Feminist Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: 25.085 - Sheraton Roundtable One - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 25.085-4 - Mothering and Daughtering as Methodological Framing: Black and Transnational Feminist Interrogations of Curricular Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose
In this paper, I posit that there remains a need for academic texts that center, amplify, and politicize the everyday lived experiences and multiple identities of Black women (and girls) in the U.S. and across the African Diaspora. I situate my understandings as a Black academic and play within the liminal space between agentic possibilities and methodological tensions in qualitative inquiry. I explore these productive tensions with the following queries in mind: How do we declare what counts as data? What are the un/disclosed rituals of interpreting data? What happens when we analyze the small print, footnotes, and data on the cutting room floor? What might such revived data tell us about the moral and ethical fallacies of scientific truth across-the-board?

Perspectives
This paper speaks to longings for methodological curricula for “colored girls” from the (neighbor)hood—academic text situated between Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Cynthia Dillard. Rooted in Black feminist approaches to qualitative inquiry, I communicate in the aesthetics of Blackness and Black womanhood “speak” that is grounded in sub/urban transcontinental experiences--that subvert the ways in which I write, cite, imagine, and live our lives. Blackness and Black woman speak, for me, mean inquiry, data analysis, and representation being portrayed as Black English, double-speak, speaking in tongues, Black beauty—styling and profiling, and girly pontifications serving up life lessons. Life becomes data; data becomes praxis; praxis becomes awareness; awareness becomes critical consciousness.

Methods
Engaged in reciprocal relationships of witnessing and experiencing, I enact a specific Black woman speak: Mother Speak. Mother Speak represents for me an intuition—or internal voice-- derived from socialization, formal learning, and biological instinct. I learned Mother Speak as an enacted form of Black feminist ontoepistemologies, something that was absent from the substantive and methodological curriculum in my education. Using Mother Speak, I share a study where I entangle narratives of my daughter’s body and my own experiences as we navigate cultural inside/outsider spaces within U.S. and Ghana. I employ various methodological moves including engaged storytelling, fieldnotes about navigating our bodies as mother and daughter, #socialmedia, and text exchanges. I represent analytic insights through messy, interrupted format, congruent with Blackness/Black woman speak. Reflecting on relationships with other women and girls in our encounter, including the inherited responsibilities of writing Black girls’ and women’s body in academia, I explore the almost-paralyzing ethical challenges of this role.

Significance
Black scholars are often educated by white faculty about “scientific research” and qualitative inquiry and assigned texts about white interpretations of the social world. This puts us in a constant state of survivance, often excluded from democratic practices and spaces, thus exasperating distrust of research enterprises. Hence, I expand the understanding of Black feminist ontoepistemologies, with an ethical engagement with bodies and narratives of people in my family and community, intersected with my own. Using these lived experiences, I challenge the explicit and implicit enactment of white supremacy and patriarchy in curriculum inquiry.

Author

• Venus E. Evans-Winters, Illinois State University