Elle Hubbard
Research Mentor(s): cooper
Mentor Department: English & Education
Authors:
Session: Session 5 (2:00pm – 2:50pm)
Presentation Type: Poster 63
Abstract
The sartorial choices of Black American students have been highly visible. The field has largely focused on how the interplay of gender, sexuality, and race has been harnessed by young Black women in student activist movements (Ford, 2013), mainly with a focus on heterosexual and cisgender women. Furthermore, these choices in presentation are centered on resistance to oppression, and while resistance is still relevant to Black students today, it is not always central to their presentation. The intention of this study is to work toward repairing the lack of knowledge around Black queer girls’ and gender nonconforming students’ interior experiences with presentation (Pritchard, 2017). This study takes place in a predominantly Black Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) in a Detroit high school. Students were interviewed broadly about their literacy practices within their GSA, school, and in their personal lives. The subject of dress often came up naturally, emerging in the dataset as “literacy performance” (Blackburn, 2003; Pritchard) for the students. Dress was discussed as a space of self-making and self-actualization, a space to explore and play with gender expression, and a practice significant to their enfranchisement and social/political agency. The participants professed profound connection with both their interior and exterior worlds and the seams joining those worlds were often formed with the literal threads of their clothing. By platforming these Black queer students’ expressions of their interiority (Quashie, 2012), this project seeks not only to make visible a rarely seen community but to make them visible on their own terms. Finally, examining the conscious choices they make in getting dressed as well as their deeply personal and unique rationales for doing so, we can gain a deeper and more vivid understanding of Black queer girls’ and gender nonconforming youths’ rich lives.
