Dissertation Proposal - approved May 2021
overview.
Since at least the rise of global Indigenous genocide, early modern colonialism, and the establishment of an international slave system during the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, Black and Indigenous peoples have cultivated land, intellect, and embodiment at the pleasure of members of dominant discourse communities. We inhabit a world built to perpetuate the imaginations of White, cisgender, upper middle-class, Eurocentric individuals and institutions; a world built to keep comfortable systems, ideologies, and powers in place. But what would happen if those of us in the margins chose to live in a world of our own imagining; a world that is as nuanced, queer, communal, and unique as we are? My research project seeks to unearth the ways in which QTBIPOC Intellectuals use disruptive, embodied imagining to cultivate defiant sovereignty and the implications of that imagining on creating inclusive ecotones with the ability to transcend prescriptive notions of place, identity, and embodiment in exchange for unapologetic sustainability of the land, body, and soul.
I will start by providing a brief definition of the tentative terms and frameworks I will use to structure my dissertation project: QTBIPOC encompasses Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color as individuals who experience multiple, scaffolded oppression in capitalist society. Defiant Sovereignty refers to the process of attaining freedom of self that is neither awarded by the oppressor nor taken by force. Instead, defiant sovereignty is the process of obtaining liberation through agentic expression of:
Specifically, a Disidentification Griot for the diaspora would speak to the experiences of those who are persecuted in our homeland (the United States) and detached in our motherland (West Africa or Caribbean) yet resiliently strive to create the Afrofutures our herstory has shown us we are capable of.
Various examples of QTBIPOC Intellectuals and their contributions to cultivating defiant sovereignty are amplified throughout this project to illuminate the cacophony of ways in which this theoretical framework and the rhetorical approaches to deploying it can be situated across other imaginations and realities. By conducting this research, it is my hope to also illuminate the rhetorical strategies and assemblage characteristics that may be able to inform how cultivating defiant sovereignty can enhance the work of advocacy, accomplice-ship, and community and our approach to the pursuit of justice. Currently, so much of the work of QTBIPOC Intellectuals is subjected to epistemic appropriation, co-optation, and gaslighting; by theorizing defiant sovereignty as liberation, this work aims to ensure an assemblage so nuanced it cannot be co-opted, yet relatable enough to incite one’s own process of reclamation and self-love.
This project arises out of a history of emergent strategies utilized by marginalized individuals – specifically QTBIPOC Intellectuals– in which small, almost inconsequential decisions collectively facilitate transformations and reimagine and reclaim notions of beauty, health, sustainability, artistry, and politics changed by the everyday, defiant actions of “others”. This project researches the performance of the everyday rather than seeks to create something completely new, amplifying the work for the intellectual capital that it is for traditionally oppressed populations. My methodology is informed by Afrofuturist Feminist Ecologies, Trauma Studies, Fat Studies, Queer Theory, Indigenous Studies, and Hood Feminism; it is an interdisciplinary approach with as rich a collection of disruptive behaviors and unapologetic existence as the artifacts of this dissertation.
To complete this work, I intend to (1) illuminate the contributions of QTBIPOC Intellectuals against the dominant institutions that render them invisible, less than, other, etc.; (2) develop a theoretical framework for cultivating liberation through consciousness and action; (3) collaboratively assemble the rhetorical strategies and epistemic features of defiant sovereigns (past and present) to understand the importance of environment, creativity, and resistance as emergent strategies; and (4) compose a dissertation not only as an academic benchmark, but as seedling, requiring adequate love, labor and light to bring about the germination of my scholarly career.
In what follows, I will describe (to the best of my ability) my project, including rationale, literature review, research questions, methodology, movement outlines, and tentative timeline in hopes of providing a relatively clear but flexible roadmap of the journey to come.
I will start by providing a brief definition of the tentative terms and frameworks I will use to structure my dissertation project: QTBIPOC encompasses Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color as individuals who experience multiple, scaffolded oppression in capitalist society. Defiant Sovereignty refers to the process of attaining freedom of self that is neither awarded by the oppressor nor taken by force. Instead, defiant sovereignty is the process of obtaining liberation through agentic expression of:
- Radical Self-Love - “our inherent state of being as worthy and enough. It is the unobstructed access to our highest selves…if we’re not participating in radical self-love, then we are by default participating in body terror. If we don’t take intentional time to dismantle these negative ideas inside of ourselves, then we’re only going to reaffirm those ideas in the world. We will continue to build new themes based off of that belief—e.g. that fat is bad, that black is bad, that age is bad, that depressed is bad, and so on—unless we undo the belief altogether… There are ways to use our bodies every day as acts of [political] resistance… As we learn to make peace with our bodies and make peace with other people’s bodies, we create an opening for creating a more just and equitable world”;
- Pleasure Activism - “Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy… pleasure is a measure of freedom; notice what makes you feel good and what you are curious about; learn ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life, to have abundant pleasure; decrease any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, quieting any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life; create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and unnecessary suffering) in your life; identify strategies beyond denial or repression for navigating pleasure in relationship to others; and begin to understand the liberation possible when we collectively orient around pleasure and longing”.
- Octavia Butler’s Ecotone – creates relationships with land that disconnect geography and power in order to situate Black Female subjectivity within environmental justice efforts and Afrofutures as constructed in Parable of the Sower. “Delinking geography and power is a significant step toward reconfiguring our earth ethics, particularly as environmental studies frameworks have traditionally been informed by colonial European notions of “the political”.
Specifically, a Disidentification Griot for the diaspora would speak to the experiences of those who are persecuted in our homeland (the United States) and detached in our motherland (West Africa or Caribbean) yet resiliently strive to create the Afrofutures our herstory has shown us we are capable of.
Various examples of QTBIPOC Intellectuals and their contributions to cultivating defiant sovereignty are amplified throughout this project to illuminate the cacophony of ways in which this theoretical framework and the rhetorical approaches to deploying it can be situated across other imaginations and realities. By conducting this research, it is my hope to also illuminate the rhetorical strategies and assemblage characteristics that may be able to inform how cultivating defiant sovereignty can enhance the work of advocacy, accomplice-ship, and community and our approach to the pursuit of justice. Currently, so much of the work of QTBIPOC Intellectuals is subjected to epistemic appropriation, co-optation, and gaslighting; by theorizing defiant sovereignty as liberation, this work aims to ensure an assemblage so nuanced it cannot be co-opted, yet relatable enough to incite one’s own process of reclamation and self-love.
This project arises out of a history of emergent strategies utilized by marginalized individuals – specifically QTBIPOC Intellectuals– in which small, almost inconsequential decisions collectively facilitate transformations and reimagine and reclaim notions of beauty, health, sustainability, artistry, and politics changed by the everyday, defiant actions of “others”. This project researches the performance of the everyday rather than seeks to create something completely new, amplifying the work for the intellectual capital that it is for traditionally oppressed populations. My methodology is informed by Afrofuturist Feminist Ecologies, Trauma Studies, Fat Studies, Queer Theory, Indigenous Studies, and Hood Feminism; it is an interdisciplinary approach with as rich a collection of disruptive behaviors and unapologetic existence as the artifacts of this dissertation.
To complete this work, I intend to (1) illuminate the contributions of QTBIPOC Intellectuals against the dominant institutions that render them invisible, less than, other, etc.; (2) develop a theoretical framework for cultivating liberation through consciousness and action; (3) collaboratively assemble the rhetorical strategies and epistemic features of defiant sovereigns (past and present) to understand the importance of environment, creativity, and resistance as emergent strategies; and (4) compose a dissertation not only as an academic benchmark, but as seedling, requiring adequate love, labor and light to bring about the germination of my scholarly career.
In what follows, I will describe (to the best of my ability) my project, including rationale, literature review, research questions, methodology, movement outlines, and tentative timeline in hopes of providing a relatively clear but flexible roadmap of the journey to come.
exigence and rationale
Exigence for a Framework Capable of Cultivating Defiant Sovereignty
The inception of this project began while following the posting of Black Twitter’s 2017 discussion of media representation (#thefirsttimeIsawme) and the 2018 viral post of a young, Black girl standing in front of Michelle Obama’s First Lady Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. As a complicated scholar and activist, I began to reflect on my own intellectual ancestry and community and felt a deep sense of isolation. Everything about me just seemed to be too much –Black, Samoan, and Irish; from South Central and rural Iowa; being geeky and bougie; being a Fat Smoker in good health; being opposed to organized religion yet spiritual; a recovering addict who still used psychedelics; loving Beyonce, bluegrass, and ballet; the list goes on and on. At this point, it is natural to be overcome with a sense of anger, isolation, pain, apathy – all appropriate feelings simply in need of repurposing.
In “Uses of Anger,” the great Audre Lorde challenges Black, Queer, Creative, Scholarly Womxn to appreciate and deploy anger creatively as acts of resistance. So instead of believing that being, doing, and caring about so many pieces of me was an imperative impossibility, I chose to allow my anger of erasure facilitate the development of discovering, creating, and imagining my own defiant sovereignty.
As our world continues to become increasingly interconnected and increasingly polarized, those in the margins continue to be traumatized by erasure and enraged by inhabiting 400+ years of institutional oppression. It is through developing a theoretical framework, a heuristic like cultivating defiant sovereignty, that we can provide an opportunity for individuals to transform their anger into creative empowerment and reclamation of spaces, identities, and bodies. By approaching liberation as a process that must be cultivated – planted, fed, nourished, nurtured, given adequate space and time to reach the point of harvest – the plants we sow on the lands of identifications can sustain our bodies, minds, spirits, and communities. Working through one’s own traumas, contradictions, nuance, and soul allows for creative imagining of healing, self-love, activism, pleasure, and potential.
Rationale for Queer Assemblage of the Fat QTBIPOC Intellectual as Liberatory Acts
Simply put, Fat, QTBIPOC Intellectuals have been instrumental in challenging imagined realities throughout the 20th and 21st century, yet they are common victims of historical erasure. In her book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings provides a detailed, well-informed history of how Fat QTBIPOC Women have been forced to overcome prescribed narratives. Seen as deviants in regard to doctrines of spirituality, sexuality, health, beauty, ability/disability, and societal fitness; they are too much and not enough, invisible and hyper visible, mother and fetish.
In addition to and in spite of this, the Fat QTBIPOC Intellectuals endure trauma, compose healing, cultivate defiance, soldier to sovereignty, and free multitudes in the process. It was the Combahee River Collective Statement that informed us that once Black women are free, we will all be free, and the work of liberation has been facilitated thus far by the liberation imagining of Fat, Black Women. The individual archives and rhetoric of the individuals being highlighted through this dissertation have (re)centered Fat QTBIPOC Intellectuals in liberating foodways, health, queerness, wellness practices, beauty, and sustainability. So much necessary labor that is only able to be completed through emergent strategy and commitment to living in radical imagined futures.
Emergent Strategy, developed by adrienne maree brown, is the ability to “notice the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies . . . Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to and embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.” Informed by the Afrofuturist fiction of prophet Octavia Butler, Emergent Strategy and Fat QTBIPOC Intellectuals as liberation practice situate the work and theoretical usage not as a cataclysmic event that leads to change, but instead as small, sustained works that are key to societal impact.
For example, Lizzo’s movement of body-love and fat activism did not happen with one Instagram post but with one picture or post, or song, or story at a time, in sequence and in transparent assemblage. In the language of defiant sovereignty, Lizzo shared her triumphs, failures, battles, pain, joy, fun, and sorrow so that others could see the unpredictable challenges and victories in sustaining unconditional love for ourselves. Patrick Kelly started his fashion career in a thrift store, but through persistent self-discipline, advocacy, and determination was the first American to be admitted to the “Chambre syndicale du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode”. And lastly, Audre Lorde’s cancer advocacy did not occur at the onset of the diagnosis, but through daily journaling, conversations with loved ones, and reflections on ideologies that led her to refuse breast reconstruction or prosthetics. These acts of liberation, radical reimagining, and community were made possible by these griots’ continuous pursuit of queer assemblage of self-discovery, --healing, -empowerment, -love, and -liberation.
This project will choreograph the intellectual contributions of Patrick Kelly, Audre Lorde, and Lizzo – their body/mind, nuance, and work – harmoniously, mobilizing it across different spheres and habitus to create a fuller herstory. By placing texts of the past with the politics, epistemologies, and ecologies of the present, we can begin to theorize strategies for ensuring liberating Afrofutures.
I am personally and professionally thrilled by the potential of this project. As a feminist archival-researcher, I am aiming to embody a griot identity as method and methodology, This work will galvanize community-based pedagogies of pleasure activism and the implications of expanding who, how, where, and when we engage with histories that can interdisciplinary contribute to the fields of Rhetoric and Composition; Cultural Studies; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies.
The inception of this project began while following the posting of Black Twitter’s 2017 discussion of media representation (#thefirsttimeIsawme) and the 2018 viral post of a young, Black girl standing in front of Michelle Obama’s First Lady Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. As a complicated scholar and activist, I began to reflect on my own intellectual ancestry and community and felt a deep sense of isolation. Everything about me just seemed to be too much –Black, Samoan, and Irish; from South Central and rural Iowa; being geeky and bougie; being a Fat Smoker in good health; being opposed to organized religion yet spiritual; a recovering addict who still used psychedelics; loving Beyonce, bluegrass, and ballet; the list goes on and on. At this point, it is natural to be overcome with a sense of anger, isolation, pain, apathy – all appropriate feelings simply in need of repurposing.
In “Uses of Anger,” the great Audre Lorde challenges Black, Queer, Creative, Scholarly Womxn to appreciate and deploy anger creatively as acts of resistance. So instead of believing that being, doing, and caring about so many pieces of me was an imperative impossibility, I chose to allow my anger of erasure facilitate the development of discovering, creating, and imagining my own defiant sovereignty.
As our world continues to become increasingly interconnected and increasingly polarized, those in the margins continue to be traumatized by erasure and enraged by inhabiting 400+ years of institutional oppression. It is through developing a theoretical framework, a heuristic like cultivating defiant sovereignty, that we can provide an opportunity for individuals to transform their anger into creative empowerment and reclamation of spaces, identities, and bodies. By approaching liberation as a process that must be cultivated – planted, fed, nourished, nurtured, given adequate space and time to reach the point of harvest – the plants we sow on the lands of identifications can sustain our bodies, minds, spirits, and communities. Working through one’s own traumas, contradictions, nuance, and soul allows for creative imagining of healing, self-love, activism, pleasure, and potential.
Rationale for Queer Assemblage of the Fat QTBIPOC Intellectual as Liberatory Acts
Simply put, Fat, QTBIPOC Intellectuals have been instrumental in challenging imagined realities throughout the 20th and 21st century, yet they are common victims of historical erasure. In her book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings provides a detailed, well-informed history of how Fat QTBIPOC Women have been forced to overcome prescribed narratives. Seen as deviants in regard to doctrines of spirituality, sexuality, health, beauty, ability/disability, and societal fitness; they are too much and not enough, invisible and hyper visible, mother and fetish.
In addition to and in spite of this, the Fat QTBIPOC Intellectuals endure trauma, compose healing, cultivate defiance, soldier to sovereignty, and free multitudes in the process. It was the Combahee River Collective Statement that informed us that once Black women are free, we will all be free, and the work of liberation has been facilitated thus far by the liberation imagining of Fat, Black Women. The individual archives and rhetoric of the individuals being highlighted through this dissertation have (re)centered Fat QTBIPOC Intellectuals in liberating foodways, health, queerness, wellness practices, beauty, and sustainability. So much necessary labor that is only able to be completed through emergent strategy and commitment to living in radical imagined futures.
Emergent Strategy, developed by adrienne maree brown, is the ability to “notice the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies . . . Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to and embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.” Informed by the Afrofuturist fiction of prophet Octavia Butler, Emergent Strategy and Fat QTBIPOC Intellectuals as liberation practice situate the work and theoretical usage not as a cataclysmic event that leads to change, but instead as small, sustained works that are key to societal impact.
For example, Lizzo’s movement of body-love and fat activism did not happen with one Instagram post but with one picture or post, or song, or story at a time, in sequence and in transparent assemblage. In the language of defiant sovereignty, Lizzo shared her triumphs, failures, battles, pain, joy, fun, and sorrow so that others could see the unpredictable challenges and victories in sustaining unconditional love for ourselves. Patrick Kelly started his fashion career in a thrift store, but through persistent self-discipline, advocacy, and determination was the first American to be admitted to the “Chambre syndicale du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode”. And lastly, Audre Lorde’s cancer advocacy did not occur at the onset of the diagnosis, but through daily journaling, conversations with loved ones, and reflections on ideologies that led her to refuse breast reconstruction or prosthetics. These acts of liberation, radical reimagining, and community were made possible by these griots’ continuous pursuit of queer assemblage of self-discovery, --healing, -empowerment, -love, and -liberation.
This project will choreograph the intellectual contributions of Patrick Kelly, Audre Lorde, and Lizzo – their body/mind, nuance, and work – harmoniously, mobilizing it across different spheres and habitus to create a fuller herstory. By placing texts of the past with the politics, epistemologies, and ecologies of the present, we can begin to theorize strategies for ensuring liberating Afrofutures.
I am personally and professionally thrilled by the potential of this project. As a feminist archival-researcher, I am aiming to embody a griot identity as method and methodology, This work will galvanize community-based pedagogies of pleasure activism and the implications of expanding who, how, where, and when we engage with histories that can interdisciplinary contribute to the fields of Rhetoric and Composition; Cultural Studies; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies.
Literature Review
A Eulogy for Intersectionality and the Kairos of Assemblage Theory
While the history of intersectionality is quite contested, since the term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1991, it has been almost synonymous with Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and (I argue) the neoliberal academy. Although the work of intersectionality has been an invaluable resource in amplifying the work of Black feminist scholars and the Black/Queer experience, it has become a common place term and theory in discussions of oppression and experience, and it has become almost shield-like for White Feminist and White Fragility with almost a exiling quality for those who do not believe it serves their purpose, perpetuating epistemic appropriation and co-opted discourses for capitalistic gains.
Let me be clear: I appreciate intersectionality, the Black women who created it, extended it, and live it. In her paramount text Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins challenges Black Feminist scholars to add to, critique, and expand Black Feminism (including intersectionality). Her matrix of domination has been key to understanding the ways in which intersectionality and oppressive forces work to the detriment of disenfranchised individuals. Various visualizations and ways of thinking have been used to understand the matrixes of intersectionality, either those of domination and/or meaning-making as discussed by Rita K. Dhamoon. I, personally, find the matrixes hard to imagine or visualize. The most common visualization for intersectionality (used by Crenshaw) is that of a traffic intersection, where identities converge to create a subjective, unique experience. And it is in this visualization that I find my biggest concern with intersectionality due to the fact that it is a stagnant, isolated incident, when identities do not work in such a neat format. Inevitably, the time has come for the fields of English and WGSS to engage with the notion of intersectionality in new ways. Thus, the time has come for me to reinvigorate my analysis of Fat QTBIPOC Intellectual Griots through the theory of assemblage and becoming.
Assemblage is a philosophical school of thought initiated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While assemblage is not clearly defined in the text, “[a]n assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” In contrasting assemblage to intersectionality, assemblage is a fluid, evolving, relational interaction within which meaning is made and becoming occurs: “Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, appearing.” Becoming assemblage is a process of negotiation, trial and error, and mobility. Whereas intersectionality can be seen as a matrix or intersection, I see assemblage as a city, a living breathing collective, where we become by moving, revitalizing, and exploring different aspects of the same organism. Within the work of this dissertation, I will use assemblage theory not only as a methodology for interrogating the work cataloged in the archives, but by interactions, process, relationship, and travel to/through/among/within the spaces and communities as well. While the process of becoming is never linear, coherent, or easy for those of us in the margins, assemblage allows us to articulate, investigate, and relate to the process in profound subjective ways.
Resisting Epistemic Appropriation through Disidentifications
Subjective performances and embodiments produced by Black QTBIPOC Intellectuals can create extensive rhetorical velocity across borders (both visible and invisible). In the process of cultivating becoming and claiming one’s sovereignty, individuals can face epistemic oppression and (most commonly with regards to public figures in marginalized communities) epistemic appropriation. While there has been extensive scholarship on epistemic oppression, a discussion that I believe serves this work best is epistemic appropriation by Emmalon Davis, where the epistemologies of marginalized knowers are either (1) detached or (2) misdirected. Epistemic detachment is the process of intracommunal uptake that overtly removes the knowledge creator from the knowledge. Epistemic misdirection is the process of marginalized knowledge creation being detached and repurposed by dominant discourse communities to perpetuate institutional power structures. When knowledge is detached and appropriated in life, scholarship, or any other sphere; trust, transparency, and intracommunal collaboration is lost. There are many ways in which the creatives highlighted throughout this work are resisted, disrupted, refused; and that is particularly done vis disidentification.
Developed by José Esteban Muñoz, “[d]isidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.” This act of political defiance is a way of performing that does not provide space for epistemic appropriation; instead, it is a creative expression so specific to one’s subjective experience, communal literacies, and embodiment that it must be appreciated for the nuanced artform it presents. It is through the resistance of epistemic appropriation and a complex embodiment that defies the scripts of the dominant discourse that scholars, peoples, creatures, and lands in the margins can attain sovereign agency and expression.
Decolonizing Healing, (re)mixing Beauty, Communal Liberation
Indigenous and African Diasporic compositions, specifically those deployed by Lorde, Kelly, and Lizzo, work to decolonize the body/mind/borderland towards Afrofuturist imaginings. Their work teaches members of their communities (Black, Fat, Disabled, Queer, etc.) the ways in which we are living within the White Anglo- Protestant (WAP) imagination and began to imagine a world in which they were enough, a world where they could write their own (her)story. “In African American women’s texts, bearing witness functions vibrantly in the creation of a ‘true’ and honorable self. A valuing of ‘truth’, ‘authenticity’, and the ‘genuine’ creates a pathway that is knowable, and it makes transformative power available for the writer and for her audiences,” Jacqueline Jones Royster notes. Jones Royster emphasizes the importance of theory, discussion, and scholarship where Queer and Black bodies have a voice to tell their own stories, Not for the benefit or understanding of their White counterparts, but to communicate their lived experience in a language made for them, by them.
Eurocentric approaches to health, wellness, beauty, and a myriad of other scripts all arrive at an outcome attune to Eurocentric traditions. Health is based on a BMI, wellness is based on diet and BMI, beauty is based on color and absence of BMI. Society conditions marginalized bodies to strive for an existence that can never be attained, thus justifying their marginalization due to deviance, divine predestination, or sloth – potentially a combination of those and more. But what can be said about Lizzo who is vegan, works out weekly, is a classically trained flautist, who twerks her 300 lbs of flesh? Or Patrick Kelly – the first American to be recognized for fashion excellence with the reappropriation of Blackface as couture, beauty, and the Black South? Or Audre Lorde, who chose to not get breast reconstruction following a mastectomy because, as a warrior, she was proud of her scars? In addition to just being plan bad asses, this is the work of emergent strategy, the work of creating communities all their own.
Through their work they not only empower themselves through radical self-love, but they are liberating communities who have always existed in the shadows to finally have their day in the sun: “Empowerment involves rejecting the dimensions of knowledge whether personal, cultural, or institutional, that perpetuate objectification and dehumanization. African-American women and other individuals in subordinate groups become empowered when we understand and use those dimensions of our individual, group, and disciplinary ways of knowing that foster our humanity as fully human subjects.” Hill-Collins, along with the griots in this work, can show us in English Studies and WGSS how (re)imagining and/or storying lives can create new worlds of possibility for ourselves and others. It is a form of activation that allows people not to see themselves in relation to systems of hierarchy, but as ecotones, outside of capitalism and towards Afrofuturist imagining.
Obviously this is a large undertaking, but one that is essential to the survival and self-love of so many. In this dissertation I will assemble the following: creative expression; trauma and healing; body/mind/ecology; disidentifications and decolonization; Afrofuturist imaginings; radical self-love; and community. I aim to weave a nuanced theory of the griot. Storying across spaces with tales of epics, odysseys, triumphs, defeat, communities, queens, kings, and destinies. Stories that transform worlds of proscriptive, minimizing pasts; painful, erased and/or appropriated presents; to unapologetic, radical Afrofutures.
research questions
- How do theories of assemblage advance the decolonizing efforts within QTBIPOC communities? What are the affordances of these collaborations over bodies, spaces, times, and place?
- What do Fat QTBIPOC Intellectuals do to resist epistemic appropriation and erasure? How can assemblage allow for nuanced, antiracist approaches to resisting appropriation to that intersectionality does not?
- How can scholars in English Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies perform feminist archival research (in traditional archives, through travel, visiting flea markets, engaging with communities and architecture) and auto-theory to advance herstories, presents, and Afrofutures as sites for scholarly inquiry?
- What potentials for community-based engagement and accessibility are afforded through autotheory and griot as method and praxis? What affordances does autotheory provide for material sustainable amplification of creative expression and research as pleasure activism?
- How can one develop a pedagogy that acknowledges the violent inceptions, compositions, and lived experiences of QTBIPOC bodies and empower acts of disidentifications and sovereign occupation?
- What can the rhetorical strategies used to in doing the “work” of healing and sovereignty to facilitate storying and the creation of potential for emergent strategy?
methodology
I view this dissertation as my emergence as a “legitimate, disruptive, innovative” scholar within the fields of English Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Thus, my methodology will take a nontraditional approach to the genre of the dissertation and utilize autotheory, feminist archiving, and pleasure activism in situ. By blending scholarly analysis, creative non-fiction, performance art, and digital composition, this work and its interdisciplinary approach will create more access to the work we do as scholars within the field and allow for intellectual contributions, previously seen as outside the purview of the academy to amplify the stories of those changemakers in the margins.
The nexus of this work will be autotheory as discussed by Lauren Fournier (2021) in her book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. According to her discussion, autotheory is seen as a methodology that allows scholar-researchers to engage with work that exceeds or transcends traditional genres and/or labels: “[Autotheory] describes the self-conscious way of engaging with theory – as a discourse, frame, or mode of thinking and practice – alongside lived experience and subjective embodiment, something very much in the Zeitgeist of cultural production today – especially in QTBIPOC – spaces that live on the edges of art and the academia.” By using autotheory, the work of attaining research and data from the archives, research, and any other method of inquiry that fits within the frame of this project will not be used or examined just as research act, but be framed based on my subjective engagement with them, assisting in the decolonization of epistemology and intellectual capital. Through the methodical insertion of mapping, sketching, handwritten documentation, photographs, and other multimodal components; this work of autotheory will be accessible to more potential audience members as well as disrupt the notion that traditional alphabetic text is the preferred or necessary medium for scholarship within our fields, mirroring or employing the expressive formats used by the subjects within this work.
By challenging the monolithic or prescriptive components of scholarship, I also want to join the movement that is challenging the monolith archival research by aligning with feminist archiving practices. There is a wealth of scholarship on the importance of histography in composition and literacy communities, yet much of this research is working within the framework of the colonized, capitalist, neoliberal sense of scholarship and what is worth being archived. Do archives have to live in libraries or museums? Where and how are everyday people reclaiming archives and histories? What is worth the space, memory, care, upkeep? Does it have to be written? How can we archive embodiment, oral histories, healing processes? How can we get those archives to those who need that ancestrial intelligence? Thus, I will be employing the feminist archiving strategies as outlined by the Digital Women’s Archive North (DWAN) to develop and engage in archival research that disrupts these traditional notions and posits the researcher as integral to the experience of data collection, distribution, and analysis. It also demands work be done to achieve equality, access, and empowerment to girls and women: “Feminist archiving [contributes] to a circular process of creating the society we want to be evidenced . . . support[ing] education, skilling and empowerment through ensuring a participatory and creative role in developing what archives can and should be [for women and girls].” By going to the Patrick Kelly archives (New York) and upcoming museum exhibit of his designs for the first time since 2011 (San Francisco), the mobilization and journey of the researcher as griot is as important in interpreting the texts of Kelly as the archives themselves. The same can be said for the Lorde papers (Atlanta and Berlin) and Lizzo (Instagram and Tik Tok – potentially Bonnaroo). I will work to create a living archive, engaging with the cities, spaces, places, and communities that are committee to this archival work and to what end these collections can influence the scholarship and sovereignty we have therein.
To tell the tales of these griots, it is imperative that I embody the qualities of a griot and be cognizant of the serendipity that takes place when the embodied, material, and space/place converge. In “(Per)forming Archival Research Methodologies,” Lynée Lewis Gaillet speaks of the potential for archival research in developing transformational strategies for the composition classroom. “Rhetoric and composition scholarship often and necessarily works outside the box, using archival materials in ways that perhaps weren’t intended by the collector and often producing what Linda Ferreira-Buckley labels ‘revolutionary shifts in who counts.’” By engaging with the archives with a disruptive feminist lens, my research aims to showcase the ways in which Audre Lorde counts for more than her most cited work, “The Master’s Tools”; that Lizzo matters more than being supposedly “body positive” and “brave”; that Patrick Kelly matters more than we all give him credit for.
This work and my scholarship must go out into the world and do “things”; that said, this methodology will utilize a Pleasure Activism as coined by adrienne maree brown. In her edited collection Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown discusses pleasure activism as a way to sustain activist work and activist participation in it to create lasting change. Instead of focusing on the lack or absence of equality (which I think we all know exists), this dissertation will discuss and analyze work that highlights pleasure in process and material compositions or performance as active resistance to epistemic appropriation.
I am using the space of this dissertation to educate or critique colonizers and their history of oppression, fragility, and exploitation; I consciously want to amplify the pleasurable forms of resistance portrayed by griots Patrick Kelly, Lizzo, and Audre Lorde. Their work and lived experiences will give ancestry and insight into the pages, artistry, visuals, sounds, and creative expression of this dissertation. Instead of allowing White, Anglo-, Protestant (WAP) ideology to occupy a majority of these pages, I choose to create an experience of pleasure: I will #citeasister and focus on the beauty of those who inspired it and allowed it to be incepted. This will be facilitated by following the pleasure principles as outlined by brown:
The nexus of this work will be autotheory as discussed by Lauren Fournier (2021) in her book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. According to her discussion, autotheory is seen as a methodology that allows scholar-researchers to engage with work that exceeds or transcends traditional genres and/or labels: “[Autotheory] describes the self-conscious way of engaging with theory – as a discourse, frame, or mode of thinking and practice – alongside lived experience and subjective embodiment, something very much in the Zeitgeist of cultural production today – especially in QTBIPOC – spaces that live on the edges of art and the academia.” By using autotheory, the work of attaining research and data from the archives, research, and any other method of inquiry that fits within the frame of this project will not be used or examined just as research act, but be framed based on my subjective engagement with them, assisting in the decolonization of epistemology and intellectual capital. Through the methodical insertion of mapping, sketching, handwritten documentation, photographs, and other multimodal components; this work of autotheory will be accessible to more potential audience members as well as disrupt the notion that traditional alphabetic text is the preferred or necessary medium for scholarship within our fields, mirroring or employing the expressive formats used by the subjects within this work.
By challenging the monolithic or prescriptive components of scholarship, I also want to join the movement that is challenging the monolith archival research by aligning with feminist archiving practices. There is a wealth of scholarship on the importance of histography in composition and literacy communities, yet much of this research is working within the framework of the colonized, capitalist, neoliberal sense of scholarship and what is worth being archived. Do archives have to live in libraries or museums? Where and how are everyday people reclaiming archives and histories? What is worth the space, memory, care, upkeep? Does it have to be written? How can we archive embodiment, oral histories, healing processes? How can we get those archives to those who need that ancestrial intelligence? Thus, I will be employing the feminist archiving strategies as outlined by the Digital Women’s Archive North (DWAN) to develop and engage in archival research that disrupts these traditional notions and posits the researcher as integral to the experience of data collection, distribution, and analysis. It also demands work be done to achieve equality, access, and empowerment to girls and women: “Feminist archiving [contributes] to a circular process of creating the society we want to be evidenced . . . support[ing] education, skilling and empowerment through ensuring a participatory and creative role in developing what archives can and should be [for women and girls].” By going to the Patrick Kelly archives (New York) and upcoming museum exhibit of his designs for the first time since 2011 (San Francisco), the mobilization and journey of the researcher as griot is as important in interpreting the texts of Kelly as the archives themselves. The same can be said for the Lorde papers (Atlanta and Berlin) and Lizzo (Instagram and Tik Tok – potentially Bonnaroo). I will work to create a living archive, engaging with the cities, spaces, places, and communities that are committee to this archival work and to what end these collections can influence the scholarship and sovereignty we have therein.
To tell the tales of these griots, it is imperative that I embody the qualities of a griot and be cognizant of the serendipity that takes place when the embodied, material, and space/place converge. In “(Per)forming Archival Research Methodologies,” Lynée Lewis Gaillet speaks of the potential for archival research in developing transformational strategies for the composition classroom. “Rhetoric and composition scholarship often and necessarily works outside the box, using archival materials in ways that perhaps weren’t intended by the collector and often producing what Linda Ferreira-Buckley labels ‘revolutionary shifts in who counts.’” By engaging with the archives with a disruptive feminist lens, my research aims to showcase the ways in which Audre Lorde counts for more than her most cited work, “The Master’s Tools”; that Lizzo matters more than being supposedly “body positive” and “brave”; that Patrick Kelly matters more than we all give him credit for.
This work and my scholarship must go out into the world and do “things”; that said, this methodology will utilize a Pleasure Activism as coined by adrienne maree brown. In her edited collection Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown discusses pleasure activism as a way to sustain activist work and activist participation in it to create lasting change. Instead of focusing on the lack or absence of equality (which I think we all know exists), this dissertation will discuss and analyze work that highlights pleasure in process and material compositions or performance as active resistance to epistemic appropriation.
I am using the space of this dissertation to educate or critique colonizers and their history of oppression, fragility, and exploitation; I consciously want to amplify the pleasurable forms of resistance portrayed by griots Patrick Kelly, Lizzo, and Audre Lorde. Their work and lived experiences will give ancestry and insight into the pages, artistry, visuals, sounds, and creative expression of this dissertation. Instead of allowing White, Anglo-, Protestant (WAP) ideology to occupy a majority of these pages, I choose to create an experience of pleasure: I will #citeasister and focus on the beauty of those who inspired it and allowed it to be incepted. This will be facilitated by following the pleasure principles as outlined by brown:
- What you pay attention to grows . . . Tune into happiness, what satisfies you, what brings you joy.
- We become what we practice . . . ’300 repetitions produces body memory…[and]3,000 repetitions creates embodiment’
- Yes is the way . . . pleasure is the processes of my existence and states of my being. Yes is a future. When I feel pleasure, I know I am on the right track.
- When I am happy, it is good for the world.
- The deepest pleasure comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment. Commit yourself fully to the process, the journey, to brining the best you can bring. Detach yourself from ego and outcome.
- Make justice and liberation feel good.
- Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic.
- Moderation is the key. The idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times, but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for. you, to be able to feel what enough is. Related: pleasure is not money. Pleasure is not even related to money, at least not in a positive way. Having resources to buy unlimited amounts of pleasure leads to excess, and excess totally destroys the spiritual experience of pleasure. (15)
chapter outlines
Introduction/Literature Review
The overture of this dissertation will begin with a necessary scene setting for the research and scholarship being conducted through this project. For example, I will begin with acknowledgement of the font that I have chosen for this dissertation proposal and for my final project: Raleway. Raleway is a neo-grotesque font, part of a class of types labeled by white typographers as “grotesque” during the early nineteenth century for their allegedly ugly departure from the Roman and serif models. Developed by Matt McInerney and the League of Movable Types, which advocates for open-source fonts, Raleway has recently become a popular choice for activist visual rhetoric. However, it is not recognized by most corporate, dominant platforms like Microsoft Word. This means that if this font is chosen by an activist author, the reader either cannot see the text in its intentional visual form or the reader must do the additional labor of downloading and installing the font, which may or may not work in a given operating system. In fact, Microsoft Word defaults Raleway to an italic font, and at times even as Comic Sans, thus distracting from, at the least, and infantilizing, at the most, the authorial intention. This visual work of typography, and the exclusivity of the invisible dominant discourses that attempt to override my artistic choice as a QTBIPOC Scholar, is just one of the ways in which my dissertation will embody – even in its alphabet – an act of resistance.
By tracing this project as integral to current conversations within the fields of Rhetoric and Composition, Black Feminist Ecocriticism, Fat Studies, Queer Studies, Trauma Studies, and Cultural Studies, I hope to provide a foundational explanation and overview for cultivating defiant sovereignty that will then be followed by a section dedicated to providing definitions for key terms and concepts being used throughout the work. I will conclude with a discussion of the unique artistic expression that will take place in this work as auto-theory and a cultivation of defiant sovereignty in praxis (probably manifest as a digital dissertation). This section will conclude with the research questions and artifacts for case study.
Method/Methodology and Developing Theoretical Framework
I plan to begin this chapter discussing the various methods used for this research including auto-theory, cartography, and archival research to highlight the significance of the strategy within the methodology. I will then discuss the key methodologies that informed the research strategies including Autotheory, Fat Studies, Disidentifications, Hood Feminisms, Pleasure Activism, and Black Feminist Ecocritcism. Each methodology will be presented in a way that highlights the overarching theme of assemblage and articulate the affordances of assemblage as opposed to intersectionality. This chapter will conclude by providing a brief discussion of the features presented to support cultivating defiant sovereignty through the case studies and implications for adopting the framework in various disciplines within the Humanities.
Patrick Kelly
By conducting archival research of the Patrick Kelly collection at the New York Public Library, I will highlight the ways in which Kelly utilized textiles, design, and Southern culture to reclaim the Fat, Black archetype, Mamie, and other artistic expressions in ways that allowed him the title of the first American to be admitted to the European institute of haute couture as a Queer, Black man from the Jim Crow South. This chapter will focus on cultivating defiance through fashioning as liberation from painful tropes, aiding in the emergence of reclamation and communal healing. This chapter will address the rhetorical tenets of pleasure activism uncovered through engagement with Kelly’s textiles, South, sketches, and travels.
Audre Lorde
This chapter will be developed following careful analysis of Audre Lorde’s corpus as well as the personal texts, sketches, letters, and unpublished works of Lorde from her archive collection located at Spelman University in Atlanta, Georgia. While engaging with Lorde, this chapter will focus on the cultivation of defiant sovereignty as it specifically relates to her critique of Western medicine, academic institutions, and views of sexuality. Lorde’s work provides a key framework for working through defiant scholarship and resisting the comfort of the dominant in pursuit of liberating survivors, creating strong bonds of sisterhood, and using erotics for radical change. The work of Lorde is a seminal example of epistemic appropriation (the Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House) so this chapter will conclude with discussion of the constraints assigned to her work through monolithic interpretation. This chapter will address the rhetorical tenets of pleasure activism uncovered through engagement with Lorde’s work, health, and travels.
@lizzobeeating
As the only living case study being conducted in this project, I will conduct an analysis of Lizzo’s live and studio performances, interviews, and the archives of her Instagram timeline to situate her intellect as key in cultivating defiant sovereignty through performed contradictions. Lizzo is a rapper and orchestral flautist, a Fat, QTBIPOC Icon with body image issues, a vegan, healthy, nonbinary with a history of depression, anxiety, and homelessness. As a liberatory act, Lizzo actively rejects proscribed identities, in exchange challenging notions of her as a brave, body positive role model. Her work demands that (often) White feminist orators realize these tropes are steeped in White guilt instead of respecting their unapologetic origins. This chapter will address the rhetorical tenets of pleasure activism uncovered through engagement with Lorde’s digital media, performances, and lyrics.
Implications and Conclusion
The final chapter of this dissertation project will discuss the implications of this work on scholarship within the various assembled fields of study and the college classroom. I will then consider the future of this project in conjecture with my professional research agenda as well as deploy a call for critical engagement with others in the margins. The project will conclude with a speculative narration of my desired Afrofuturist world and our collective liberation.
The overture of this dissertation will begin with a necessary scene setting for the research and scholarship being conducted through this project. For example, I will begin with acknowledgement of the font that I have chosen for this dissertation proposal and for my final project: Raleway. Raleway is a neo-grotesque font, part of a class of types labeled by white typographers as “grotesque” during the early nineteenth century for their allegedly ugly departure from the Roman and serif models. Developed by Matt McInerney and the League of Movable Types, which advocates for open-source fonts, Raleway has recently become a popular choice for activist visual rhetoric. However, it is not recognized by most corporate, dominant platforms like Microsoft Word. This means that if this font is chosen by an activist author, the reader either cannot see the text in its intentional visual form or the reader must do the additional labor of downloading and installing the font, which may or may not work in a given operating system. In fact, Microsoft Word defaults Raleway to an italic font, and at times even as Comic Sans, thus distracting from, at the least, and infantilizing, at the most, the authorial intention. This visual work of typography, and the exclusivity of the invisible dominant discourses that attempt to override my artistic choice as a QTBIPOC Scholar, is just one of the ways in which my dissertation will embody – even in its alphabet – an act of resistance.
By tracing this project as integral to current conversations within the fields of Rhetoric and Composition, Black Feminist Ecocriticism, Fat Studies, Queer Studies, Trauma Studies, and Cultural Studies, I hope to provide a foundational explanation and overview for cultivating defiant sovereignty that will then be followed by a section dedicated to providing definitions for key terms and concepts being used throughout the work. I will conclude with a discussion of the unique artistic expression that will take place in this work as auto-theory and a cultivation of defiant sovereignty in praxis (probably manifest as a digital dissertation). This section will conclude with the research questions and artifacts for case study.
Method/Methodology and Developing Theoretical Framework
I plan to begin this chapter discussing the various methods used for this research including auto-theory, cartography, and archival research to highlight the significance of the strategy within the methodology. I will then discuss the key methodologies that informed the research strategies including Autotheory, Fat Studies, Disidentifications, Hood Feminisms, Pleasure Activism, and Black Feminist Ecocritcism. Each methodology will be presented in a way that highlights the overarching theme of assemblage and articulate the affordances of assemblage as opposed to intersectionality. This chapter will conclude by providing a brief discussion of the features presented to support cultivating defiant sovereignty through the case studies and implications for adopting the framework in various disciplines within the Humanities.
Patrick Kelly
By conducting archival research of the Patrick Kelly collection at the New York Public Library, I will highlight the ways in which Kelly utilized textiles, design, and Southern culture to reclaim the Fat, Black archetype, Mamie, and other artistic expressions in ways that allowed him the title of the first American to be admitted to the European institute of haute couture as a Queer, Black man from the Jim Crow South. This chapter will focus on cultivating defiance through fashioning as liberation from painful tropes, aiding in the emergence of reclamation and communal healing. This chapter will address the rhetorical tenets of pleasure activism uncovered through engagement with Kelly’s textiles, South, sketches, and travels.
Audre Lorde
This chapter will be developed following careful analysis of Audre Lorde’s corpus as well as the personal texts, sketches, letters, and unpublished works of Lorde from her archive collection located at Spelman University in Atlanta, Georgia. While engaging with Lorde, this chapter will focus on the cultivation of defiant sovereignty as it specifically relates to her critique of Western medicine, academic institutions, and views of sexuality. Lorde’s work provides a key framework for working through defiant scholarship and resisting the comfort of the dominant in pursuit of liberating survivors, creating strong bonds of sisterhood, and using erotics for radical change. The work of Lorde is a seminal example of epistemic appropriation (the Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House) so this chapter will conclude with discussion of the constraints assigned to her work through monolithic interpretation. This chapter will address the rhetorical tenets of pleasure activism uncovered through engagement with Lorde’s work, health, and travels.
@lizzobeeating
As the only living case study being conducted in this project, I will conduct an analysis of Lizzo’s live and studio performances, interviews, and the archives of her Instagram timeline to situate her intellect as key in cultivating defiant sovereignty through performed contradictions. Lizzo is a rapper and orchestral flautist, a Fat, QTBIPOC Icon with body image issues, a vegan, healthy, nonbinary with a history of depression, anxiety, and homelessness. As a liberatory act, Lizzo actively rejects proscribed identities, in exchange challenging notions of her as a brave, body positive role model. Her work demands that (often) White feminist orators realize these tropes are steeped in White guilt instead of respecting their unapologetic origins. This chapter will address the rhetorical tenets of pleasure activism uncovered through engagement with Lorde’s digital media, performances, and lyrics.
Implications and Conclusion
The final chapter of this dissertation project will discuss the implications of this work on scholarship within the various assembled fields of study and the college classroom. I will then consider the future of this project in conjecture with my professional research agenda as well as deploy a call for critical engagement with others in the margins. The project will conclude with a speculative narration of my desired Afrofuturist world and our collective liberation.