“I Wanna Be Bad”: Black Educator Deviance, Desire, and Delight

• In Event: You Can’t Steal My Joy! Practices and Possibilities for Black Joy in Urban Education

Abstract

School technologies of discipline infiltrates Black women educators’ movement beyond the confines of the classroom and shapes the logics of spaces meant to encourage their joy and pleasure. A group of Black teachers’ experience negotiating deviance, desire, and delight while at a strip club inspired the writing of this article. I use a Black queer feminist analysis to hold tenderly this moment as a signifier of Black educators’ embodied experiences and discursively produced subjectivities within and beyond the porous contexts of American schooling. Black deviance, desire, and delight are slippery concepts always-already within grasp and out-of-grasp for these educators given the perniciousness of antiblackness, homophobia and misogynoir. This inquiry highlights the inescapable disciplining of Black women educator’s institutionalized subjectivities while also suggesting ways in which their illegibility creates a Black geography for their erotic power as educators (hooks 1994; McKittrick, 2006). While shame and precarity did force their ways into the space, these educators experienced unquestionable Black joy. As a result, conversations about Black Joy in education must include Black educators’ sexualities and interrogate desire, labor, and access to confront the traps of capitalism and assimilation that conflate Black joy with the maintenance of the status quo. Ultimately, Black women educators need dire, immediate relief from the disciplining logics that impede on their pleasure pursuits beyond the plantation/spaces of captivity they enter daily for teaching.

Author

• Anna Almore, University of Michigan