Intellectual Gatekeepers: Reclaiming Black Queer Youth as the Public

• In Event: Creating Space for Academics Through the Project of Public Intellectualism as Public Engagement

Abstract

The deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Ares, Buendía, & Helfenbein, 2016; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; McKittrick & Woods, 2007) of the spaces and places are knotted complicated conversations within the intra-public (Barad, 1999; Masumi, 1998). This paper addresses these ongoing dialogues through African American intellectual traditions (e.g., Bethune, 1939; Cooper, 1892; DuBois, 1903; Woodson, 1933) as they are entwined with contemporary queer theories (e.g., Halberstam, 2011; Muñoz, 1999; Sedgwick, 1993) to explicate the space of the intra-public for black queer middle school youth in an urban context.
Using data from a two-year sonic ethnography (Gershon, 2013), this article seeks to re-consider the agentic contengencies (Author, in press) that are central to understanding the “who” and “how” of intra-public intellectual spaces and places. Specifically, the context surrounding an art exhibit curated by queer middle school youth at the Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is analyzed. In this project, while students were the experts of their identities, their art, and their research, the author was continuously called upon for her expertise as it was understood by others to usurp that of the youth. This is not unusual, given the consistent tension between lines of transparency, equity, and voice in qualitative research (Behar, 1996; Geertz, 1973). However, what is particularly of note in this project is how the researcher and the students were also used as a conduit for school administration and museum staff’s sociopolitical gain. In other words, how much space, time, attention, and respect was given to this project and the students was generally dependent on how their work and presence was understood to be helpful to the success of the school and the museum’s urban educational outreach programs.
Findings from this study and the resulting exhibit have at least the following significant implications for dialogues on public intellectualism. First, it raises an important question: if everything is always already entangled, which part of the intellectual belongs to the intra-public? Second, this study argues for a stronger attention to how marginalized voices in general and for those of black queer youth in specific to be valued as inherently intellectual in nature. Finally, this paper seeks to re-consider everyday oppressions often found in arts-based educational research that have fallen into all-too-familiar patterns of qualitative research that are inherently marginalizing. If, to quote Sedgwick (1993), we are to find solutions to the indelible numbers found within queer student self-harm and suicide, this work becomes increasingly important as it seeks to center black queer youth as the intellectual and decenter the gatekeepers that tend to un-intentionally devalue queer youth role within the intra-public.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Loyola University