Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.
—Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
That literacy, in its many forms, is critical to the lives of queer people of color may be the most seemingly apparent statement of twenty-first-century literacy, composition, and rhetoric research, and yet it is completely taken for granted. This fact alone necessitates a fuller consideration of the role literacy plays among queer people of color beyond the parameters of my intervention. Pursuant to exploring this statement, my work here grew from research questions, methodologies, and analysis that led to my theorization of the literacies of everyday Black LGBTQ people. A primary labor of Fashioning Lives is my theorization of Black LGBTQ literacies as they detail the myriad ways where literacy, in all its dynamism, plays a central and complicated role in research participants’ reflections on their everyday lives. In particular, my work demonstrates how literacy normativity problematically shapes literacy as a personal, institutional, and interactional experience in Black LGBTQ people’s everyday lives, and it reveals what they do to navigate this reality to survive. That survival, I posit, grows from, comes to represent, and becomes an instrument of self- and communal love.
Observing this, what this book demonstrates is what we miss in LCR, as well as Black queer studies, when we take the role of literacy in the lives of everyday Black LGBTQ people for granted. The stories from my research participants offer two major outlooks to literacy, composition, and rhetorical studies and the interdisciplinary field of Black Queer Studies. For LCR, my analysis of extant research invites us to think about social location in more complex ways when we accept the fact that reductive approaches to identity are inevitable if we are not deliberate and courageous in attending to the possibility that our positionality may obscure parts of our analytical vision. For me this means that even though the forces that create and shape my literacy narrative as a Black feminist gay cisgender man may also create and shape the experiences of research participants, I must still be deliberate in being attentive to elements that could remain obscured by the particularities of my positionality on, to return to Royster’s metaphor cited in the introduction, the rhetorical landscape. The same geography of literacy, composition, and rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy that created the mountains of African American and LGBTQ literacies also creates the valley where complex Black queerness remains unconsidered, waiting to come into focus through deliberate interventions, not just because it would otherwise go overlooked (which is in itself important enough) but also because, as I have shown throughout this book, Black queerness helps us to recalibrate our view so that we can see what we thought we knew differently and look beyond what already exists.
For Black queer studies, the gift of these stories is to see and appreciate the importance of literacy in everyday Black queer life, something that is, again, taken for granted in Black queer critique. Considered attention to everyday life requires a break in analytical focus for Black queer studies because literacy is so central to everyday life. We cannot understand the experience of Black LGBTQ life without more fundamental attention to reading and writing as a part of that daily living, and also for the role it plays in social, cultural, and political phenomena that have drawn the attention of Black Queer Studies. Cathy Cohen expressed concern that, if we are not careful, the field of Black Queer Studies will become a project of recovery of work from “a lost tribe of Black gay exceptionals.”1 While my focus on literacy is not exempt from Cohen’s healthy concern and skepticism about Black Queer Studies—especially given that literacy is still attached to narratives of exceptionalism—a so-called “good” education is still treated as a privilege rather than a right, and literacy and educational attainment does not realize the myth of social and class mobility or safety promised for those who acquire it. Therefore, a focus on literacy is an ideal location for Black Queer Studies to address the “everyday” and focus attention on the textual productions of those “everyday” people. For those who theorize, teach, and do creative and activist projects, it is important to be attentive to the pervasiveness of literacy history because it is part of the raw materials people use to create cultural productions; or even in terms of reception, how lives are affected through the consumption of these cultural productions.
The scholarly, pedagogical, and social justice implications of more attention to sexual and gender elements of Black formations invites us to consider the impact of normativity on the literacy lives of a constellation of nonnormative Black gender and sexual subjects we have yet to fully consider as a field. It is my hope that this will not be the last work on what I have come to think of as Queer of Color Literacies, which may focus on the reality of queerness within racialized gender and sexual formations and on the various matters of sociopolitical concern scholarly and activist interventions bring to the landscape with critiques of colonialism/settler colonialism, White supremacy, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and other genocidal and oppressive forces. In terms of a specific focus on Black queerness within this broader formulation—citing Cathy Cohen’s exploration of the radical potential of queerness that cuts across racial formations of gender and sexuality including deviant Black heterosexualities, and what Roderick Ferguson refers to as “a taxonomy of Black nonheteronormativity”—I offer in this book Black Queer Literacies, a rich field of study that invites us to consider a myriad of queer of color subjects, individuals, and groups whose racialized gender and sexual identities are deemed nonnormative.
The applicability and value of Black Queer Literacies is perhaps best seen through already existing scholarship in the field. One recent work that comes to mind is Elaine Richardson’s intrepid literacy memoir PHD to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life (2013). Richardson’s narrative details her own literacy learning and practice inside and outside of school settings, alongside a discussion of sexual violence, abortion and reproductive health, single motherhood, drug addiction and her witnessing of illicit economies of street life, from drug dealing and pimping to her own participation in sex work. The conclusion of Richardson’s narrative discusses her educational success: she eventually earned her PhD and became an internationally acclaimed scholar of literacy and language studies, as well as a singer and songwriter. Each of these factors from Richardson’s early life is a nonnormative Black formation by way of some detail around gender, sexual, or socioeconomic deviance and disrespectability. Thus Richardson’s literacy narrative, though not about Black LGBTQ people, is a story that clearly lives at the intersections of race and queerness and is thus an example of the wide array of scholarly works that could fit under the rubric of Black Queer Literacies—as could research on literacies and single parents, historical and contemporary literacy studies and the discourses of racialized gender and sexuality about people on public assistance, sexuality, and prison literacies, to name only a few. More work must be done to make such a framework a more sustained and substantive focus of how race and queerness are considered in literacy, composition, and rhetoric research. Such LCR research on race queerness could do so in ways that are inclusive of though not exclusive to Black LGBTQ people.
To that end, however, there remain a number of potential projects within Black Queer Literacies that concern just Black LGBTQ people. In the introduction I name a number of these potential future projects on the writing and rhetorical practices of Black LGBTQ people, including those from rhetorical history studies of Black LGBTQ public address to longitudinal studies on the experiences of Black LGBTQ students and Black LGBTQ teachers in writing classes. I add to that the need for research on the long tradition of Black queer language, vernacular, and the rhetorical tropes of “shade” and “reading” prevalent among Black queer folks, which would extend what we currently know about Black English and expand theories of “signifyin,” “masking,” and other features of African American language practice. Much work remains to be done on Black LGBTQ people in literary and visual and performance movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance, Black arts movement, and hip-hop culture; the contributions of Black LGBTQ people to civil rights, Black power, and Black labor movements; the role of literacy in the writings and public address of historic and trailblazing politicians, activists, orators, and writers such as Bayard Rustin, Barbara Jordan, Marlon Riggs, Barbara Smith, Essex Hemphill, Cheryl Clarke, and Joseph Beam, among others; classroom ethnographies and other scholarship on literacy, composition, and rhetorical pedagogy that focus on Black LGBTQ students; Black LGBTQ popular culture, including television shows, films, and digital series; and the literacy and rhetorical practices of LGBTQ people within the African diaspora outside the United States, particularly in Latin America, Canada, Europe, Jamaica, and Haiti.
My exploration of Black LGBTQ literacies focuses not on the meaning they create through literacy but on the meaning they give to literacy. It is in those meanings that my major concepts of literacy normativity and restorative literacies—including the ancillary concepts literacy concealment, literacy suppression, historical erasure, and the various forms of guerilla praxis of literacy—are visible and gain definition and dimension across shifting sites of engagement. In terms of literacy normativity and the meanings given to literacy as a result, I explore here how literacy, for my participants, in its messiness and precariousness, is often experienced as betrayal, particularly when used as a tool of surveillance, unsafety, danger, risk, fear, historical erasure, spiritual violence, and abjection in discourses of desirability. The meaning, however, of literacy, given by participants through their tactics of restorative literacies, is that literacy as a wounding text can be rehabilitated and restored for social transformation necessary to undo the very harmful and violent normativities that emerge in and through it.
While my theorization of literacy normativity, restorative literacies, and ancillary concepts are all tools to examine literacy as a personal, institutional, and interactional phenomenon at the intersections of race and queerness, this theory is also an invitation to take up dimensions to these concepts that are outside the scope of my focus here. Certainly, for example, more research on the intersections of literacy normativity will be necessary to determine the full range of its historic impact on literacy learning and in literacy institutions across other communities, including other LGBTQ people. As I have stated, normativity is already a keyword with a long history in cultural studies, and especially within LGBT and Queer Studies. However, as I’ve demonstrated, there are everyday lives, as well as discipline- and field-specific foci and questions, that show there remain dimensions of how normativity functions that can be accessed and engaged more complexly for literacy studies, specifically those focused on race and queerness. My particular wish is that this future work will, first and foremost, deal more sustainably and substantially with the intersections of race and queerness. But moreover, the application of literacy normativity, as I have done here, has more to gain if theorized from a place that acknowledges how the very nature of literacy, literacy institutions (e.g., school, library, home, church, work, etc.), and what it means to be human means we are already complicit with normativity. For Fashioning Lives, my aim was to examine how people navigate life given the paradox of literacy normativity as describing something that did damage and wounded research participants but was also often the scene where research participants employed literacy as an act of self- and communal love that contributes to broader quests for social and political change to disrupt normativity. An example from the preceding chapters that most reflects this can be seen in the numbers of research participants who adopted tactics of literacy concealment—hiding, stealing, and recreation of space or place—to navigate feelings of fear, danger, and unsafety associated with literacy. In these moments research participants were doing restorative literacies in the context of normative literacy traditions and institutions; by illuminating this contradiction around normativity, the transformational work accomplished by research participants becomes visible.
I offer restorative literacies to codify the diversity of methods Black LGBTQ people use to create and sustain their identities and environments in ways that demonstrate and engender self- and communal love. This self- and communal love takes various shapes, such as writing for empowerment, justice, self-care, healing, truth-telling, and community formation. Restorative literacies is not a means to argue for Black LGBTQ literacies as a practice in desire of recognition, acceptance, or normality; rather, it describes how research participants create an environment to truly have and live a life in the fullest sense of the word on their own terms. My analysis in chapter 4, of research participants who employ literacy not to broaden what counts as desirable but to define what has been traditionally called undesirable as the most personally and politically transformative work at the intersections of literacies and the erotic, best exemplifies this impulse. Harriet Malinowitz writes that “margins produce not only abject outsiderhood but also profoundly unique ways of self-defining, knowing, and acting; and about how, though people want to leave the margins, they do want to be able to bring with them the sharp vision that comes from living with friction and contradiction.”2 While many of the research participants express feelings that are as Malinowitz describes here, there were just as many who do not imagine leaving the margins to join the same center that disavowed them or even reconsolidating the destabilization of their critique into a new center. They seek to find another way forward, to create a world that does not yet exist, and to employ literacies toward those ends.
Literacy normativity and restorative literacies are further applicable as a framework for reconsiderations of social theories of identity in the scholarly, pedagogical, and institutional discourses shaping and shaped by LCR. There are often in both scholarly discourses around identity, an inability at times for us to see, hear, and ultimately engage one another across difference. This, unfortunately, emerges as a praxis of literacy normativity within scholarly discourse. What I propose, in order to move beyond this place where we are stuck, is airing grievances on each of these fronts, and a commitment and recommitment to an ethics of intellectual community that requires epistemological empathy, accountability, humility, and intersectionality.
In terms of social theories of identity in literacy, composition, and rhetoric, like theories of intersectionality, my work is committed to the central notion that identity is critical to an analysis of literacy history and theory. Identity is the very matter people are made up of, and is therefore in the fabric of every phenomenon we mine as researchers. For literacy, composition, and rhetoric I maintain, as decades of scholars have argued, that everyone has identities and that all literacy narratives are stories that tell us something about identity, and vice versa. Within this context, I am arguing for the necessity of intersectionality as not only a theory of identity itself but as a praxis, which for me is the synthesis of theory and practice. The praxis of particular focus here is intersectionality as a research methodology and as a disciplinary position that exposes the self-reflexive work that remains to be done for literacy, composition, and rhetoric, and especially for those who work in critical race, feminist, and queer theory approaches. As I say in chapter 2, intersectional analyses often cast it as either an analysis of power or an analysis of multiple identities, but the work of restorative literacies, as my research participants demonstrate, requires attention to both identity and power. This approach to intersectionality returns to the original articulation of identity and oppression as theorized by women of color feminists, such as the Combahee River Collective, Cheríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa whose writings on activism offer an analysis of oppression and identity as multiple and co-constructing. As such, we must also observe that these women of color feminist writer-activists were also among the first to assume the interconnections of race and sexuality in their work, a crucial point that is overlooked in critical race, feminist, and queer theory approaches to literacy, composition, and rhetoric. The consequence is that critical race, sexuality, and queer theorists assume that turning to racialized sexuality is joining two areas of social theory that, for many, have already been joined and regularly deployed in theory and in lived experience. This practice is itself a literacy normativity that must be productively challenged through a commitment to methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical self-reflexivity.
LGBT, Queer, and Sexuality Studies researchers have historically, as Roderick Ferguson notes, looked to Michel Foucault’s important intervention in The History of Sexuality as the birthplace of sexuality and later LGBT and Queer Studies. Doing this, those fields have convinced themselves that “its engagements with sexuality are the only and most significant pursuits of that formation.” In fact, women of color feminists preceded queer and sexuality studies, including Foucault, by at least a decade when they “theorized sexuality as a constitutive component of racial and class formations.” Consequently, queer and sexuality studies’ and Black studies’ otherwise fraught relationships share and contribute to the elision of women of color feminisms. These feminisms not only had an earlier engagement with questions around sexuality but “women of color feminism [also] has the longest engagement with racialized sexuality,” and therefore “we must admit that there are other terrains for the interrogation of sexuality, terrains that do not begin and end with queer studies.”3 For example, Black lesbian feminists like the Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, and Cheryl Clarke called for and contributed to an analysis of Black sexualities in the early 1970s against a backdrop of heteropatriarchal domination that resisted discourses of sexuality in general, and of Black lesbian identity especially. Indeed, these Black lesbian feminists were arguing about the problematic silences around sexuality, generally, and demonstrating its significance as a crucial variable in accessing the diversity of Black life and culture while noting the specific ways Black lesbian and gay people were ignored in a hostile climate of homophobia and heterosexism.
Fashioning Lives more deliberately, substantially, and sustainably emerges from such a vantage point and enacts these commitments. It is this legacy of intervention at the intersections of critical race, feminist, and queer theory that forms the critical genealogy and logic underpinning what this book—operationalizing itself as restorative literacies in this regard—brings to literacy, composition, and rhetoric: a deliberate, self-conscious, and self-reflexive Black queer-feminist critique grounded in the scholarly discourse of literacy, composition, and rhetorical studies and informed by the intellectual traditions of critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, and queer studies. This is the political and conceptual bedrock of my analysis in this study. Black queer-feminist critique attends to the place of sexism, misogyny, heteronormativity, heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia that is structured and informed by racism while giving substantive consideration to how conceptions of race and racism are informed and structured by other -isms and phobias. For example, as a Black feminist gay cisgender man and academic, a Black queer-feminist analysis exposes the ways racism, heterosexism, and homophobia affect my identify formation and affirmation, and my literacy practices, while exposing my own cisgender, male, and class privileges. Further, my intention in naming my approach is to acknowledge the contributions of the critical intellectual and activist labor, traditions, and commitments that inform it. I also name my approach so as not to take for granted the need and responsibility to make it and the larger scholarly tradition it joins legible for future work that will engage race, class, gender, and sexuality and its interaction with queer critique in literacy, composition, and rhetorical studies on its own terms.
The utility of literacy normativity and restorative literacies can be understood in relationship to broader quests for social and political change in addition to those waged by my research participants, from the streets to the literacy, composition, and rhetoric discipline. Consider the social movement called Black Lives Matter. In 2012, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors created #BlackLivesMatter in outrage over the ways the criminal (in) justice system and the media “post-humously placed [Martin] on trial for his own murder” while Zimmerman walked free. In the years since Martin’s murder, the numbers of Black men and women murdered in the streets with impunity have climbed, and Black Lives Matter has emerged as “a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society” and a means for “broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state . . . the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity.” In addition to the critique of the state, Black Lives Matter has always critiqued the “narrow nationalism” that can be prevalent in Black communities and social movements that “merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black, and buy Black” while “keeping cis[gender] Black men in the front of the movement.” Instead Black Lives Matter “centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements” to “(re)build those movements.”4
Black Lives Matter’s self-description and manifesto critique a number of ways normativity forms rigid and violent conceptions of Blackness, Black identity, gender, sexuality, xenophobia, disability, and social movements that are directly or tacitly in cahoots with anti-Black, anti-queer, xenophobic, and ableist state violence. Despite its founders’ clear articulation of a movement that is rooted in a commitment to justice for all Black people, considering that all three founders were women and two are queer, it was not long after its founding that attempts were made to appropriate Black Lives Matter toward ends that were cisnormative, heteropatriarchal, ableist, xenophobic, and anti-Black. In fact a number of these appropriations and co-optations did not just erase the founders’ intentions for the movement but they also erased the founders themselves when a number of people began to talk about Black Lives Matter without acknowledging its founders and early activists in the movement, and especially the clear queerness and centering of gender justice in the movement from the outset.
The heteropatriarchal practice of this erasure did not go unchecked. For example, The Feminist Wire published “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement” an essay by Alicia Garza.5 The essay both corrects the record and attempts to return the movement to its roots in a radical intersectional quest for social and political transformation and justice. As I witnessed the erasure of Black Lives Matter’s founders and the critique of cisnormativity and heteropatriarchy, it was impossible for me to not recognize that we were witnessing the historical erasure of Black women’s, including Black queer women’s, contributions in real time, similar to the kinds of historical erasure discussed in chapter 2. Simultaneously, by publicizing the organization’s herstory and various editorials and articles, we were also witnessing restorative literacies by the founders and many other activists that interrupted the literacy normativity of this erasure while continuing to resist the ways the state and its progenitors were trying to impose a meaning on Black life and Black death that reflected a multitude of violences. At the same time, Black queer and transgender activists and allies, via open letters, critiqued the violence of the silence of many White LGBTQ activists and organizations who said nothing about Black men, women, and children being killed in the streets with impunity. Efforts were also made to hold White LGBTQ activists and allies accountable for not being vocal about the specific ways transgender people of color are targeted for street harassment, physical and emotional violence, and murder.6
In between 2014 and 2016 alone, the symbiosis between social movements occurring in the digital and physical realms have reflected the clarion call for Black and LGBTQ social movements and policies to be self-reflexive through the application of a radically intersectional analysis. #WhyWeCantWait was created to critique the exclusion of Black girls from President Obama’s White House Initiative “My Brother’s Keeper,” which focuses on Black and Brown boys while ignoring the fact that Black and Brown girls are subject to the same, and most often far worse, conditions in schools, the streets, and at home. #BlackTransLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlsMatter, were created to focus attention on the many cisgender and transgender Black women and Black transgender people, specifically, who have been subject to violence and murder but are not given the same attention or urgency among activists as cisgender heterosexual Black men. All of these hashtags are reflective of Black feminist and queer activists, intellectuals, and allies who have been and are working in social movements on the ground to affirm that, as another hashtag says, #AllBlackLivesMatter, thus enacting restorative literacies demonstrating love for themselves and their communities by challenging the ways the state’s and its progenitors’ actions are violent and lead to death for those on the margins of society, including Black LGBTQ people. These actions illuminate the role of literacy normativity in the actions that activists and everyday people are resisting, as reflected in policy, media coverage, and other wounding texts that occur on and off the page that devalue, debase, degrade, and dehumanize Black people. What literacy, composition, and rhetoric might do is further explore the language and literacy practices of these activists, organizations, and everyday resisters historically and contemporarily, and apply them as models to construct radically intersectional methodologies, theories, and pedagogies that emerge from or grow the coalitions that build and sustain these movements. Language is a crucial element in resisting this violence, and as scholars of literacy, composition, and rhetoric we are especially skilled and thus charged with developing new and affirming existing practices that do the work of social justice.
With this in mind, as I close, I am reminded of a quote by the poet and activist Pat Parker:
If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, “No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome,” because I’m going to an all-White party where I can be gay, but not Black. Or I’m going to a Black poetry reading, and half the poets are anti-homosexual, or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.7
I first read these words by Parker now ten years ago in a course, and they set me on a path that altered the trajectory of both my then-budding critical intellectual and activist commitments in literacy, composition, rhetoric and Black queer studies as I first asked myself the question: what might a theory of Black Queer Literacies be and what might it do? What I have learned from my theorization of the stories of my research participants is this: a theory of literacies grounded in the life, culture, and politics of Black queer people must be mined in a substantial and sustained interdisciplinary dialogue worthy of the history, culture, and politics of those stories shared and those yearning to be told. And what this theory might do is nurture, illuminate, and enact the very self- and communal love that fuels the very literacy actions examined throughout this book. In short, a Black Queer Literacies is what I would call a revolution.