Seeing & Believing: Celebrating Legacies of BlackQueer World Making & Survival

• In Event: Celebrating 15 Years of "Making Space": Reflections and New Trajectories of Race, Sexuality, and Justice in Education

Abstract

WHO LOOK AT ME
WHO SEE

the tempering sweetness
of a little girl who wears
her first pair of earrings
and a red dress

the grace of a boy removing
a white mask he makes beautiful (Jordan, 1969, p 7-8)

In her book length children’s poem titled, Who Look at Me (1969), Black literary genius, bisexual, author, and activist June Jordan used fine art images alongside poetry to explore the contours of Black life within and beyond the white gaze. Her work highlights interconnections of social meaning circulated about particular bodies and markers of difference, how we see each other, and what we see in each other. In our looking, we often miss the “tempering sweetness of a little [Black] girl” and “the grace of a [Black] boy” (Jordan, 1969). The inability to youthfulness in Black bodies, for example, leads to policing, misreading, and assigning harmful value to racialized performances of gender and sexuality. The remedy that Jordan proposes is echoed in the legacy of Lance McCready’s (2010) groundbreaking text, Making Space for Diverse Masculinities. Highlighting experiences of Black gay and gender non-conforming boys, McCready recalibrates the visual logics we use to understand Black youth.

This presentation takes up the words and worlds created in McCready’s scholarship, with a particular focus on the chapter, "Theorizing the Pink Ballet Tutu Incident," from Making Space for Diverse Masculinities (2010). As we note, McCready's scholarship has not only been instrumental in challenging and expanding the discourse on gender, race, and sexuality in education, but has paved a way for our own scholarship on Black queer lived experience. Accordingly, our presentation reflects on our own, “Pink Ballet Tutu” events across our educational and professional experiences in which we learned that our “soft masculinity” and “tomboy”/androgynous performances were subjects of reform, correction, and barriers to access. Offering a close reading of the chapter coupled with an analysis of our biographic experience, we ask and answer how we can see and believe Black queer people on their own terms and in service to increasing our life chances and possibilities.

Authors

• Durell M. Callier, University of Delaware

• Dominique C. Hill, Colgate University