Let Me Be: Aesthetics of the Art of Youth Embodiment

• In Event: Digging in the Soil: Bringing Light to the Invisible

Abstract

What does it mean when we are no longer bound to living our lives in opposition to whiteness? What are the possibilities when we are no longer obligated to be fighting and dismantling whiteness and systems of oppression by our very existence, but to imagine life otherwise (Berlant, 2011)? Soil work orients us to imagine life differently at the root, shifting us into thinking critically about what it means to center care of self and community, name negotiations and tensions, joy and healing. Soil Work, then through the lens of an analysis of aesthetics of youth culture (Chuh, 2019; Hernandez, 2020; Moore, 2018; Wynter, 1992), helps us to reimagines the self and forms of being that are not bound to essentialist theorization of identity such as race, gender, sexuality, age, class, ability, etc. Through this presentation, we hope to explore the ways this type of Soil Work can open discussions of life otherwise in youth collaborations that are centered by traditional academic confinements of activism and dismantling systems of oppression. Instead, what can a practice of the exploration of the aesthetics of youth culture and life extend further than current discourses of radical youth life and as a form of self care and towards healing? To explore the aesthetics of youth life we can start to uncover the ways that the performance of self can create and imagine a ritualistic and liberating art form that marginalized black, brown, and queer youth have developed and have served as a vital function of self-preservation and self-declaration. For example, we can look towards Hurston (1938) who urges us to distance forms of life of youth away from “singular and binary sensory expressions in which objects could be easily commodified into a collectible artifact.” We hope to draw from Wright who reminds us that, “no theory of life can take place of life” and we must start to discuss the ways of being that are unwritten, ignored, and left invisiblized within youth embodiment of life. Where we then are able to collaboratively have space for youth and ourselves, to foster and strengthen our own highly complex practices of being and aesthetics that are not entrenched in a neoliberalism or essentialism theology as the basis of Soil Work. Where youth can theorize themselves, create and recognize their being for them not for anyone else.

Authors

• Jihee Yoon, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author

• Malika Elizabeth Davis, YAASPA
  Presenting Author