Black Lesbian Teaching While Pregnant: Hypervisibility in the Cloud of Marginality

• In Event: Radical (Im)Possibilities of Mothering as a Black Academic: And No, This Ain’t No New Second Wave Sh*t

Abstract

“Should LGBT individuals be parents?” Every year a student raises this question in my introductory gender studies course in spite of my best efforts to teach with an LGBT affirming lens. Prior to my own pregnancy, I rationalized my decision to allow time for this discussion as a pedagogical opportunity to address dissenting viewpoints in the classroom. However, my out lesbian identity and black queer feminist politics required me to affirm the arrival of new black life and made such debates intolerable. In this paper, I reflect on the hypervisbility of blackness and queerness in the classroom during my pregnancy.

Presenter

• Shannon J Miller, Minnesota State University, Mankato