‘O Possibility/hum through’: Researcher Reflexivity in Critical Ethnography with Black Queer Girls and Femmes

• In Event: Liberatory Pedagogies: Understanding Holistic Approaches to Sexuality in Educational Research

Abstract

Thy keel floats on, O Possibility. If  I anchor as you.
If I set my anchor here. If I can hum through.
Taylor Johnson, “From ‘Hymn’”
O Possibility/hum through: This remixed line seeded in Johnson’s (2021) lyric poem “From Hymn” calls forth the methodological hopes, costs, and limitations of critical ethnography in my dissertation study with Black queer girls and femmes (BQGF) and their literacy practices in a Midwest high school’s predominantly Black Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), the Tangled Slinkys. This study invites entanglements with the Black feminist archive, myself, and the “transformative possibilities” (Brockenbrough, 2015, p. 29) held in the ways Black queer girls experience and share everyday pleasure and desire in their GSA outside of teacher-orchestrated curricula. In this autoethnographic offering, I contemplate the poetics of critical ethnography for the researcher, extending Gilmore’s (2022) definition of place as “the range of kinds of places—as intimate as the body and as abstract, yet distinctive, as a productive region or a nation-state” (p. 106) to locate the where of witnessing BQGF’s literacy practices as “emancipatory strategies” (Yaeger, 1987) embodied somatically, geographically, and materially.
When I entered the Tangled Slinkys as an adult volunteer four years ago, I thought of myself as a participant-witness-researcher, at the very least someone able to navigate the exigencies of participant-observation and at most an unapologetic co-conspirator committed to sustaining queer life, including my own. But in this last year, as I began the formalities of ethnography, I became a “vulnerable observer” (Behar, 1996), listening to my research partners, while contending with my adult self now in the Midwest and my Black queer girlhood in the South, grieving deaths, and touching the temporal caul of school’s “straightening” (Ahmed, 2006) engines. This presentation tenders an exploration of the methodological tensions of freedom and possibility within critical ethnography that examine BQTG’s pleasure and desire within their literacy engagements.
Intertwined with a biomythography (Lorde, 1982), I offer reflections of myself in situ within the Black trans poetic of being of O Possibility/hum through, a mantra that asks: What are the methodological processes and commitments of engaging in ethnography with BQGF? How do the demands of empire within the “choreography of school” (Eggermont, 2001) shape the ethnographic encounter and the ethnographer? What possibility hums in tending to my “black interior” (Alexander, 2004; Quashie, 2012) as a methodological obligation of ethnography? What freedoms become possible for the researcher within ethnographic reflection?

Author

• monét cooper, University of Michigan