A Case Study Exploring BlackQueer Youth Agency in New York City's Ballroom Scene

• In Event: Hush Harbors: The Pedagogical Possibilities of Youth Third Spaces for Classrooms and Schools

Abstract

Often excluded from scholarly discourses around the K-12 educational experiences of Black youth and LGBTQ+ youth are the lived realities of students who identify as both Black and Queer (Pritchard, 2013) and how they use their agency to fashion spaces that challenge racism, heterosexism, and transphobia (Brockenbrough, 2015)—spaces such as ballroom (Bailey, 2011).This qualitative case study seeks to complicate these single stories of BlackQueer youth victimhood and vulnerability by exploring how 10 BlackQueer youth in New York City’s ballroom scene understand and make sense of their agency.
The proposed exploration will be guided by the following research questions:

● How do BlackQueer youth who are active members in the ballroom scene in the understand and make sense of their agency in ballroom spaces?
● How do BlackQueer youth exercise their agency in the ballroom scene to respond to and/or subvert racial and sexual discrimination?
● What are the characteristics and conditions within the ballroom scene that support or inhibit BlackQueer youth in exercising their agency to respond to and/or subvert racial and sexual discrimination?

To explore these research questions, I conducted three separate interviews with allBlackQueer youth following Seidman's (2013) in depth model. I also recorded field notes (handwritten and audio), took photos and videos during the sixth months I spent in balls, and convened one 2-hour focus group discussions toward the end of the study with all participants. I relied on theories of queer of color agency (Brockenbrough, 2015; Ferguson, 2004), intersectionality ( Crenshaw, 1989) to help frame my data analysis. I drew on a Black Ratchet Imagination Methodological Perspective (Love, 2017) to help guide my choices with regard to methodology.

Exploring how BlackQueer youth understand their practices of agency in ballroom spaces to respond to and/or subvert racial and sexual oppression has the potential to diversify representations of Black youth and LGBTQ+ youth in research, extend the extant literature on Blackqueer youth, and better position educators to support BlackQueer youth in navigating the barriers to their personal and academic success. Examining the characteristics and conditions of ballroom culture that support BlackQueer youth agency provides insight into how we can reimagine education research, policy, and practice to invite BlackQueer youth into the school in humane and educative ways, encourage their agentive imaginations within educational spaces, and promote school environments that embrace these youth’s racialized and sexualized identities.

Author

• Shamari Reid, The University of Oklahoma