A Grammar of Black Livingness: Black Queer Youths’ Everyday Adornments as Literacy Performance (Poster 11)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research
  In Invited Poster Session: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research Poster Session

Abstract

Drawing from an ethnographic study of a majority-Black high school’s Gender-Sexuality Alliance in a large Midwest city, I examine Black queer girls and genderqueer youths’ “adornment practices” (Pritchard, 2017) as “literacy performance” (Blackburn, 2003; Pritchard, 2017) that allows for an embrace of their Black queer selves. The choices they make to dress themselves turn out and play with expectations of Black gender and sexuality, embracing an elision of the material and speculative worlds they create and alter. Their everyday adornment practices act as a “grammar” (Campt, 2017) of “Black livingness” (Griffin & Turner, 2021), a literacy performance in which they do not wait to become, but rather actualize pleasure through dress as a way of languaging who they are now.

Author

• monét cooper, University of Michigan