Bending Spacetime: Black Queer Girl Agency Across Place and Time

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

Abstract

Although intersectional approaches (Crenshaw, 1989) guide critical race and Black girlhood studies, attention to queer girlhoods is often relegated to recommendations sections, and Black queer girls’ perspectives are especially erased. Scholars have called for future research to center Black queer girls (Field & Simmons, 2019) and queer girls of color (Brockenbrough, 2015), but few are answering. Of the limited education research that addresses Black queer youths’ intersectional experiences, much has privileged monolithic “pain stories” (Tuck & Yang, 2014) recounting racist and cisheterosexist violence. Knowing these harms is imperative to care and counteraction. Simultaneously, this fixation upon subjugation flattens Black queer youths’ lives to the misconception that they cannot thrive in schools.

In response, I center Black queer girls’ lived experiences in and beyond schools. Specifically, I turn my attention to agency and speculative and actualized placemaking (Hunter et al., 2016) wherein Black queer girls cocreate spaces or counter publics, where not only oppositional ideas and discourse happen, but lived opposition, or at least autonomy, is chosen daily” (Cohen, 2004, p. 27) in pursuit of affirmation, joy, and kinship. I borrow from Glassgold (2007) in defining agency as the capacity to exert power in “an attempt to live as authentically in the world as we can, given its restraints and limits” (p. 47). At times, this agency “resist[s], respond[s] to, and/or subvert[s] the discrimination young people face with regard to their identities” (Reid, 2022, p. 92). At others, it is a response to selfhood, to desire, and to autonomy that is not inherently preoccupied with oppressive forces, but nevertheless, disrupts mechanisms set on Black queer girls’ demise.

Drawing upon memory; personal and state archives of K-12 schooling ephemera; and 141 letters three Black queer girls wrote to/with me while we attended high school together, I weave a story of my Black queer girl agency in the everyday educative spaces of my home and school. In these spaces, I felt a sense of assuredness, affirmation, and self-love despite the ways my body and ways of being were read and punished as deviant (Cohen, 2004). Thus, this work is an invitation for leveraging archives to illuminate pathways for locating Black queer girlhoods in historical contexts. Additionally, this autoethnographic exploration is a portal for understanding my gaze as a researcher who studies Black queer girls’ agency in contemporary school contexts. As such, I juxtapose my histories with findings from interviews with Black queer girls currently enrolled in high school to theorize about Black queer girl agency and its tenets and forms across distant geospatial and temporal locations. I argue that when Black queer girls make space for themselves and each other, they introduce a new kind of matter (and mattering) comprised of “a love-driven survival [that] is a key intervention into a world [that] is becoming less and less livable” (Gumbs, 2014, p. 233). In doing so, they alter school spacetime in ways that open wormholes to expedite fulfilled desire and insist upon their “humanity, specialness, and right to exist’’ (Collins, 2000, p. 102)

Author

• Mara D. Johnson, University of Michigan