Interanimating Black sexualities and the geography classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACT Why teach Black sexualities? How might Black lived sexualities provide students a more nuanced understanding of geography and place-making practices? The junctions of Blackness, sexuality, and place are understood as active processes that are being shaped and formed by and through power relations. This paper argues for centralizing the mutually constitutive nature of sexualities and Blackness, by troubling the normative notions of sexualities as commonly approached in curriculum and pedagogy. Focusing on Black sexualities is imperative, as Black lives, politics, and locations permeate the social order and can make visible the ways in which colonial legacies imbue global structures of dismissal, displacement, and erasure. Black sexualities are always personal and political, intermediating between systemic axes of oppression grounded in colonialism and imperialism and the agency of Black sex and sexual identities in spite of pathologizing structural components of society and space. As such, this paper considers the opportunities that Black sexualities offer in teaching and learning in the geography classroom. I consider the role of curricular choices, course discussions and assignments, and the pedagogy of embodiment. Embedded in a Black Geographies framework, I argue that centering a Black sense of place is essential to pedagogies of Black sexualities.