Offering 3: A Grammar of Black Livingness: Black Queer and Trans Youths’ Everyday Adornments as Literacy Performance

• In Event: Adorning Futures: Embodied Aesthetics as Lived Curricula for Unforgetting and Futuring Education

Abstract

For some Black queer and trans youth (BQTY) at Detroit High School, adornment—a perpetual intention toward aesthetic pleasure and internal transformation (Davies, 2020; Quashie, 2021)—is a literacy practice that uses sartorial fashion as sustenance for one’s interior self. This resource moves beyond the standards created through schooling and parental approval, instead maintaining a connection with “Black aliveness”, what Quashie expresses as a call to “be…and unfurl into the world” (p. 147). Griffin and Turner (2020) call for literacy educators and researchers to observe aliveness in Black youths’ visual work. They offer Black livingness as a practice that resists discussions of Black life only in relation to Black death, opting to vibrate within a gaze that sees “the fullness of…Black humanity” (p. 442). Adornment affirms BQTYs’ gender and sexuality through ornamentation that binds interior and exterior looking, offering a perch to gaze at the self from a place of livingness. The gaze fashions a defiance of practiced racialized cis-heteronormative and transphobic beauty hierarchies that waft across lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. Instead, this gaze embraces a powermaking rooted in a selfhood living for the self. Or, as Hurston (1934) noted as a tenet of Black aesthetic expression, “Perhaps his idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional standards, but satisfies the soul of its creator” (p. 39). By exercising “the power to choose and name beauty” (Wynter, 1992, p. 237) in ways that are soul-satisfying, BQTY not only assert their agency as knowledge producers (Brockenbrough, 2015), but also use adornment as a “literacy performance” (Blackburn, 2002; Pritchard, 2017) to celebrate themselves and welcome pleasure in a visual poiesis that decomposes school’s enclosures inside of BQTY. Blackburn denotes literacy performance as temporal “literacy practices” contoured through resistance and capture, yet always centered in the learner’s ability to wield transformative potential (pp. 24-25). Pritchard extends literacy performance to name fashion and literacy as “interlocking systems of expression” (p. 129) for Black queer youth. I assert that fashion’s enmeshment of creative selfhood portals literacy choices that allow BQTY to unfurl themselves. Adornment is thus BQTYs’ aesthetic narrations of their gender and sexuality, their methods of challenging marginalization overdetermined by adultism and heteronormativity, and their creative imbuing of the futures they live in the present.

In my study, a Black queer girl, an Afro-Latine trans boy, and an Afro-Latine gender non-conforming (GNC) youth discuss their adornment praxis as self-fulfilment and self-realization, which celebrate gender and sexuality acts that defy the logics of heteronormativity and transphobia within school. In their provocation toward arts-based research methods that take up youth of color art making, Authors 1 & 2 (2024) offer that “Creativity is about the transcendence and dissent of constricting norms” (p. 14), which the youth in my study hem through their “will to adorn” the self (Hurston, 1934). BQTY’s aesthetic practices of looking become ways educators and researchers might behold BQTY presence within school. In prioritizing beautiful living, pleasure’s aesthetic potential becomes temporally accessible to BQTY and their desired livingness actualized.

Author

• monét cooper, University of Michigan