Black Girls and Queer Filipinx Youth: A Coalitional Exploration of Body as Literacy and Home

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Cultivating Coalition Through Multiple Literacies

Abstract

This collaborative paper explores how Black girls and queer Filipinx youth reimagine the body as a sacred home through love, imagination, and reflective storytelling. Grounded in Black feminist and queer of color epistemologies, The Black Girl Literacies Project and Queer Kapamilya co-create counterspaces where youth reclaim their bodies as sites of knowledge, possibility, and memory. Through practitioner research and arts-based inquiry, youth are actively resisting erasure, honoring ancestral wisdom, and return home to themselves. We center the body as literacy. Together, these communities highlight how love and imagination are not luxuries, but are necessary practices for survival, dignity, and collective thriving in world that pushes them to forget. This is a return home through spirit, storying, and resistance.

Authors

• Anthony Andre Zarate, University of Pennsylvania

• Barrett Rosser, Morgan State University