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What happened when I invited students to see me? A Black queer professor's reflections on practicing embodied
1a Oxford Community Arts Center , Oxford , Ohio , USA.
Abstract:
What are the hesitations, dangers, and potentialities to inviting students to peruse my body? What possibilities arise from centering and leading with the body in the teaching/learning process? What risks and possibilities does this enactment pose to a Black lesbian educator? This auto/ethnography journeys through and reflects upon my experience enacting what I have coined "embodied vulnerability" as a pedagogical practice. Within this essay, I explore the interrelationship of race, gender, and embodiment (or, the performance of self). In addition, I reflect upon the pedagogical exercise-enacted over the last seven years-of asking students to see me and name what they see to illumine how social identities are read alongside context/location, as well as in relation to other assumed identities. Due to the historical and contemporary framing of Blackness and femininity-as paradoxical in popular culture and popular constructions of Blackness and queerness as antithesis-my queerness is undetectable in predominantly White classroom spaces. This essay documents my experience working through this contentious reality and offers the practice "embodied vulnerability" as a feminist practice and educative tool for mediating how the body is understood in the classroom, invoking identity and mobilizing the body in teaching/learning processes.
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