What bell hooks taught me was that I needed to love myself. Before I could love myself, I needed to see myself, to see those who reflected expansive representations of Black, sexual, and gender identities. I have worked in higher education for many years and over 18 years within units focused on diversity. Although I could not always name or define the feeling, I always knew and felt my difference. Turning toward a scholarly lens, my work offers an alternative approach to doing/thinking about research that relies on Black Feminist traditions and utilizes an affective stance of feeling or being different.
As a Black queer, gender nonconforming woman who works within a site known for the ability to transform lives as well as the potential to harm those who do not conform, I became devoted to researching and affirming those relegated to the margins and documenting their experiences. I believed I was the problem for too long: I searched for answers, attended self-help workshops, and unknowingly bought into assimilation. These searches led me astray until I realized I needed to reconcile all parts of me and seek spaces that welcomed all aspects of who I am. At every turn within my professional and personal life, I was looking for validation, affirmation, and a reflection of myself. Meanwhile, I continued to internalize feelings of inferiority and deviancy. The text Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom has been foundational in my approach to work on campus, in the community, and, most importantly, in my discovery of myself. As bell hooks discovered when shifting from all Black schools to predominantly white schools (where Black kids were seen as trespassers and where we often internalized these messages as well as feelings of being an imposter), the difference between “education as the practice of freedom and education… merely strives to reinforce domination” (hooks 1994, 4).
I developed a research method named Black Queer Revolutionary Selfhood to narrate how I read and listen to those relegated to the margins, learn more about how they feel, and pay attention to language, gestures, and non-verbal cues to allow for a powerful sense of intimacy and trust when engaging their stories. I center on Black queer, gender nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and trans educators because they often experience diversity discourse as masking the injustices of the institution, perpetuating historical acts of violence, stalling their justice work, and creating new challenges for the world we live in along with our campus environments. Many of us, who have had our non-normativity weaponized and disciplined within identity politics, struggle to be our genuine selves, to exist beyond someone’s checkbox, and to define our existence and experience for ourselves.
Caring about how we feel is extremely important to me to engage the human fully. The practice of Black Queer Revolutionary Selfhood demonstrates how the deviancy of those of us relegated to the margins disrupts mainstream diversity discourse through our personal experiences, which
help expose cursory efforts at diversity and social change in our respective communities. I conceptualize the justice worker as someone who is invested in and concerned with the ways structural inequities shape social relations and sociopolitical outlooks for those relegated to the bottom. We join movements that address these issues simultaneously instead of pitting radical/progressive movements against other social movements. This division merely reinforces the narrative that distracts, divides, and ultimately places us in danger. Bell hooks, with her words, provided the space, the desire, and the necessity to bring my whole self to all that I do, including justice work to create better conditions for all, not to perpetuate mainstream diversity or multiculturalism that fosters restrictive binaries shaped by racism, heterosexism, and classism.
I have had the pleasure of hearing bell hooks speak many times in person. Although I never met her, her death shook me as I reflected on the many lives lost because of the racial injustice of police violence, the murders of Black and Brown trans women, the global pandemic, and many other atrocities. Bell hooks taught me that if we want to grasp and acknowledge the full histories and humanity of minoritized experiences, we need to pay attention to the different ways people present their truths otherwise it restricts the possibilities to imagine these histories differently for them and for others. Bell writes, “Coming to voice is not just the act of telling one’s experience. It is using that telling strategically—to come to voice so that you can also speak freely about other subjects” (hook 1994, 148). My reading of Teaching to Transgress led me to dream of the possibility of my freedom and liberation, but also most importantly, to find my voice and the ability to love my Black queer self in a world that does not love me. Bell hooks taught me alternative ways of truth-telling and dreaming about possibilities for social change. For that, I will always be grateful, and I know that she remains within every one of us. Rest in power bell hooks.
References
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.
Muñoz, Jose Esteban. 2020. The Sense of Brown. Edited by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia
Nyong′o. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Taylor, Keeanaga-Yamahtta. 2017. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.