Choreographies of Gender: Disrupting Anti-Blackness and Its Others Through a Queer Black Male Perspective

• In Event: Troubling Gender and Sexuality: Meditations on Performances of (Un)Gendering in Black Educational Spaces

Abstract

Black communities have long been charged with “making a way out of no way,” and education has historically been a path toward economic and social equality (Du Bois, 1903). Black teacher pedagogies have their roots in the Black radical tradition, and the work of many Black teachers in the classroom is an offshoot of these forms of refusal and resistance to the anti-black schooling structures. These Black teacher pedagogies undergird a legacy of activism, high expectations, and innovative teaching for all their students. And yet, Black teachers who additionally identify as male and queer often have confounding issues with their professional identities. This paper explores how one Black queer man navigated his multiple identities to disrupt antiblackness and homophobic norms and structures in the classroom.
Teachers have been positioned to make a myriad of pedagogical decisions when they are choosing to adhere or disavow societal discourses regarding difference (Muhammad and Love, 2020; Paris, 2012; Moll, et al., 2007). Teachers navigate these expectations through what we term
choreographies of difference, which is the negotiation of how one animates various ways of being in their
discourse, values, emotions, and embodied affect to disrupt existing power relations. Black queer men teachers must negotiate their performances of race/Blackness and gender/sexuality in the classroom through choreographies of race and gender. This paper explores how a Black teacher’s embodied performance of a racial and gender served as a means to respond to the racialized and gendered elements of school production formats, revealing what selves are possible for Black teachers.
We took a Black Sexuality Studies (Lane, 2016) approach to data collection and analysis, which allowed us to use ethnographic methods “to understand how Blackness informs racialized gender and sexuality in the everyday experiences of their interlocutors” (p. 633). We conducted audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews (60 minutes in length) with Medgar three times throughout the school year, using Seidman’s (2006) framework for a three-interview series. We wanted to honor him as the knower of his experiences, and we center his storytelling as a valid source of knowledge (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). For example, after we drafted the initial findings, we shared the excerpts and the preliminary findings with Medgar to co-theorize and co-analyze (Bonilla, 2015) about his choreographies of race, gender, and sexuality.
The data sources in this study included participant observations, interviews of Medgar, and focus groups with his students. We attended Medgar’s teacher’s classes an average of three days a week during the spring semester of 2022. We engaged in observant participation (Vargas, 2006) in Medgar’s pedagogical practice, taking detailed field notes in his classrooms, lunch and extracurricular activities,

and the transitional time between instructional blocks and other daily routines. Lastly, we conducted brief audio-recorded 30-minute focus groups with sixty-one of Medgar’s students to elicit their perspectives on their learning and experiences in their classroom, using a semi-structured interview protocol to guide these interviews.
Medgar’s choreographies of race, gender, and sexuality demonstrate that choreographies of difference is an ontological rupture of quotidian expectations of racial and gender choreographies that work towards the aim of creating dynamic spaces of learning for all students. Through studying Medgar pedagogical decisions of when he performed (or did not perform) Blackness, queerness, and Black queerness uncovered the importance of strong administrative support, a classroom community that prizes difference and authenticity, and Black and queer-affirming affinity groups that support the embracing of one’s full self in the classroom.
The current national discourse around antiblackness in school environments motivates us to explore ways that Black queer men teachers can express more of the wholeness of their identities. In today’s tumultuous political climate, being out can bring risk to both their bodies and their authority as pedagogues (Alexander, 2005). Most of the research on Black queer men focuses on higher education, and as anti-Black, anti-queer, anti-trans legislation is increasing in secondary schools across the country, we have a lot to learn from how Medgar’s choreographies of race, gender, and sexuality aid in the cultural and critical consciousness socialization of his students, offering broader theoretical considerations and cognitive maps for the politics of identity formation and animation. In alignment with this year’s AERA theme,,, this paper deepens our understanding of how expressions of gender animate Black teachers’ racialized ontologies as they experiment with and pursue new gender-racial educational possibilities in the classroom.

Authors

• Jessica Lee Stovall, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Darion A. Wallace, Stanford University