Towards love as life praxis: A Black queer and feminist pedagogical orientation

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Notes

1 Drawing from Watts (2017) and Ore (2019), I use the term “murder” because “there is no justice for people already presumed to be disposable, and my use of the term murder sought to signify the value of their lives” (Ore, 2019, xiv).

2 Black healing is beyond the rational faculties and scope of antiblack capitalism because property cannot be healed—it must be disposed of when no longer useful in accruing wealth and maintaining the white cisheteronormative status quo.

3 For more on Black breath and combat breathing, see Frantz (1965), Shange (1981), Gumbs (2015), and Ore and Houdek (2020).

4 I use “(im)possibilities” (alternatives) to speak to the impossible possibilities that Black womxn create, inspire, and encourage. I use parentheses rhetorically throughout this essay to acknowledge/embrace stylistically the fluidity between possibility and (im)possibility—that which is (im)possible is possibility; that which is (im)possible to remember refers to a kind of (re)membering that is rooted in BQF worldmaking practices, blurring the lines between reality and fiction/fantasy. In doing so, we are granted moments to reimagine liveable futures beyond antiblack violence. See Spillers (1987), Hartman (1997, 2008), Wynter and McKittrick (2015), Watts (2015/2017); Warren (2018), and Ore (2019).

5 With economic freedom as the unattainable goalpost, the technical skills don’t adequately prepare students to live, collaborate, and thrive in “the now.” Additionally, this goalpost remains the standard understanding that most will never accrue the wealth that characterizes economic freedom as ownership. I use Black womxn to refer to myself, as well as to refer to collectives/collaborative groupings of Black womxn. The “x” in womxn is a stylistic gesture that places my identity as a cis Black queer womxn and cisgender heteronormativity under constant and intense interrogation. It is a rhetorical gesture that refutes/rejects traditional logics of “centering” oneself in effort to call attention to the limits and dangers of language among Black womxn navigating multilayered degrees of state-sponsored violence. The “x” is also a way I attempt to anchor an understanding of my gendered Blackness stylistically in connection and collaboration with my Black ancestral heritage.

6 I use QTBIPOC here to call particular attention to the systemic violence and harms that politically, socially, and culturally erase and of gay, queer, trans, and nonbinary folks belonging to historically oppressed racial and ethnic communities.

7 BQF teachers such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and June Jordan introduced me to the power of knowing oneself, realizing that part of how we become familiar with ourselves is by letting go of who we think we are (Gumbs, 2020). In letting go of who we think we are, who might we discover? Part of ways we let go is by imagining, dreaming, and creating new or alternative ways to relate to oneself, to others, and to the world. What might this letting go to remember look like for communication educators in the classroom, given the current state of antiblackness? Letting go in this context has more to do with letting go of the comfort/stability that old/current intellectual/academic/epistemological hegemonic paradigms provide to us for various reasons.

8 Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor (to name a select few) have taught me the importance of imagining life, breath, and future beyond the linguistic, ideological, and material reality of antiblackness.

9 By life praxis, I am focused on the necessity and utility of collaboration in imagining alternatives as a way of life.

10 My work on Afrafuturist feminist rhetoric(s) draw extensively from BQF and Afrofuturist feminism as well as Afropessimist studies to interrogate, reflect on, and speculate the complexities and nuances of gendered Blackness in and beyond an antiblack world. For more, see Hall (2020b).

11 I approach the notion of unlearning that draws on the work of Butler (2005), Alexander (2005), LeMaster (2017), LeMaster and Johnson (2018), and Gumbs (2020).

12 Looking to disrupt the distinction between fiction and nonfiction writing as black womxn writers urge readers to question the spatio-temporal limitations of rationality, logic, and white Western (physical and natural) sciences.