Feeling, (Be)Holding, Reading: Black Queer Girls & Femmes’ Spatializing Literacy Practices of Pleasure and Desire

• In Event: From Infinity to Infinity: The Plurality of Black Girl Space and Literacies

Abstract

Tenz: I have had it up to them clouds [points to windows] about that bald man way on the other side of that school!...My brain fails in that class and then I realize, why don't I ever learn anything?...this man's over here talking about, “Oh, what is the meaning of disrespect?”

Tenz, an Afro-Latine trans masculine femme student in the Tangled Slinkys, a Detroit High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance, begins the weekly opening circle with a story that on the surface touches on transphobia and adultism in school. Yet, Tenz’s storying, alongside that of the GSA’s Black queer girls, spatializes Black aliveness (Quashie, 2021), refusing resistance and the flattening narrative of marginalization as the only story Black queer girls and femmes (BQGF) tell about themselves within school. Black aliveness speaks to worldbuilding, the commitment “to imagine a black world so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of black death, of blackness that is understood only through such a vocabulary” (p. 1). BQGF’s storying within their GSA welcomes feeling, (be)holding, and reading as spatializing literacy practices that suture desire and pleasure as typical for Black queer youth—an observation that stands counter to the literature on Black girls and queer youth and the violences they encounter within school (Epstein et al., 2017; Mittleman, 2018; Morris, 2016; Pritchard, 2013; Wun, 2016, 2018).

In considering BQGF’s aliveness as a place of study, literacy educators and researchers must observe the ways BQGF matter to themselves, how they engage this mattering, and the locations where this mattering occurs. Their ceremonies of languaging aliveness act as a “literacy technology” (Pritchard, 2017) that shifts space-time to create Black queer kinship, generate knowledge, and feel (Judd, 2023) within the grammar of Black trans feminist futurity (Bey, 2022; Campt, 2017) made possible by their vocabulary and storying practices (Johnson, 2017; Toliver, 2022). Researchers must examine the most “wayward lives” (Hartman, 2019), attending to BQGF, youth whose grammar, lives, and decisions remain counter to school hegemonies, ongoing social inequalities, policy enclosures, and Black death as logical arrangements.

This paper takes up calls for research to center Black queer youth in agentic frames (Brockenbrough, 2013; Field and Simmons, 2019; Love, 2017). I draw on data from my critical ethnographic study of the Tangled Slinkys, where I serve as an adult volunteer. This investigation invites increased research in youth-driven literacies that Black LGBTQ+ youth foster outside of adult orchestration. Using Black Interiority (Quashie, 2012) as a method of data analysis, the findings note that when adults center BQGFs’ realities in school, BQGF demonstrate complex and skilled literacy practices that allow them to unsilence themselves and shift space-time: asserting their Black queer, girlish selves; transmitting knowledge; and employing an ecstatic vocabulary to read each other in ways that critique and reorder school’s power relations toward their pleasure and desire. I ask: What possibilities do BQGF create and inhabit for themselves within school? What do they employ that affords a method of languaging who they are and what they experience beyond abjection?

Author

• monét cooper, University of Michigan