Blackqueer Practices of Survival: Black Lesbian Poetry as Educative Possibilities for Black Mattering

• In Event: Future Directions in Queer of Color Scholarship Across Educational Settings

Abstract

What are pedagogical and theoretical contributions of Black lesbian poetry? What tools does poetry offer for analyzing the entanglements of Blackness and queerness? In what ways does the creation and content of Black lesbian poetry contribute to Black mattering? How can the educational possibilities of Black and queer youth be reimagined through poetry? Interrogating these questions, this paper highlights how poetry as a theoretical tool makes Black queer worldmaking possible. A world, which does not require the harm or premature death of Black, queer youth. A world in which all Black lives matter. It demonstrates the application of Black lesbian poetry in understanding contemporary Black and queer educational experiences as they are (re)produced by anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and racialized homophobia. We advance Black Lesbian poetry as a useful theoretical and methodological intervention in research and practice for interpreting the lives and resistance of Black queer youth.

Interested in situated knowledges created from a need for survival, we build on inter/transdisciplinary orientations of queer of color scholarship. QOCC as a field emerges from women of color feminisms instead of white and American centered gay/lesbian/queer theory (Hong & Ferguson, 2011). Within this tradition, we turn to Black lesbian poetry from the latter half of the 20th century for its theorization of knowledge, power, and difference beyond white supremacy, anti-Black racism, and heteropatriarchy. In her 1984 essay Poetry is not a luxury, Audre Lorde elucidates the necessity of poetry to articulate and actualize freedom beyond, “living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization (p. 38).” For Lorde, poetry makes Blackness and queerness knowable, more than the “logics and inscriptions'' through which racialized capitalism and heteropatriarchy order our bodies. Despite Lorde’s theorizing of poetry as a tool to shift oppressive epistemic and pedagogic frames, poetry’s usefulness to educational theory and inquiry is seldom explored. Highlighting alternative genealogies and mediums for interpreting racially and sexually minoritized narratives, we think with Black lesbian poets--Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Nikky Finney to articulate the conditions of our lives. We utilize literary, textual analyses (Christian 1985) of poems from each of the aforementioned authors, alongside critical discourse analyses (Fairclough, 2003) of recent media reportings of two school incidents of racialized homophobia and gender policing experienced by Black and queer youth.

The scholarly significance of this study is twofold. First, it expands previous queer of color scholarship intervening into education (Author, 2013; Brockenbrough 2015, Cruz 2013; Pritchard 2013) by drawing extensively on women of color feminist poetry. Secondly, it provides another tool to enact justice for Black and queer youth by attuning to forms of inquiry and modes of being that radically challenge anti-Black racism and white supremacy (Brown, 2013; hooks 1990, Leavy, 2010; Madison & Hamera 2006). At a precipice of change, educational researchers and practitioners must reckon with how our research methodologies, theories, and epistemologies elide Black queer experiences. We propose expanding our toolkits to understand these experiences and imagine life sustaining possibilities for Black queer youth.

Authors

• Dominique C. Hill, Colgate University

• Durell M. Callier, Miami University