Reparative readings: re-claiming black feminised bodies as sites of somatic pleasures and possibilities

Black girls and women in the west reside at the nexus of racism and sexism, pinned down by a vitriolic hate for the black feminised body that is wedded to legacies of slavery. Dominant discourses configure these bodies as animalistic and other (than human), thus informing a range of (educational) policies, practices, and programmes. These narratives shape teachers’ curricular and pedagogical practices in ways that potentially objectify and wound black girls. In this paper, we use Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips [Lee, Andrea. 1984. Sarah Phillips. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press] and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia [Senna, Danzy. 1999. Caucasia. New York: Riverhead] to trouble said dominant discourses by engaging in ‘reparative readings’ [Sedgwick, Eve. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press Books] of the texts’ black female protagonists. We re-read these main characters' bodies as sites of pleasure and possibility, not singularly or solely harm. In doing so, we show how curriculum theorising can be mobilised for repair, and can function to humanise othered and marginalised bodies.     

“I Just Love Black People!”: Love,Pleasure, and Critical Pedagogy in Urban Teacher Education

With concern to critical pedagogy, the concept of love is fairly frequently (ab)used, yet under-theorized. In this exploratory study, I ask: How does a critical pedagogy of love—or critical pedagogical love—look, sound, and feel? Regarding feeling, how does a critical pedagogue engage the sensations of pleasure attendant to love? Lastly, how does the pedagogue invite love and pleasure into the pain-filled field of urban teacher education? Using Black feminist theorizing of love as an analytic filter, I investigate a university-based urban teacher educator’s navigation of the nexus of love, pleasure, and critical (specifically, antiracist) pedagogy. Extrapolating from the resultant narrative portrait, I consider the affordances of a critical pedagogy of love that accesses embodied pleasure, emphasizing how such a pedagogy might present racially marginalized persons—particularly urban teacher educators of Color—with opportunities for reprieve from the suffering that characterizes many of our experiences with/in teacher education.