title: What happened when I invited students to see me? A Black queer professor's reflections on practicing embodied vulnerability in the classroom.
abstract: What are the hesitations, dangers, and potentialities to inviting students to peruse my body? What possibilities arise from centering and leading with the body in the teaching/learning process? What risks and possibilities does this enactment pose to a Black lesbian educator? This auto/ethnography journeys through and reflects upon my experience enacting what I have coined "embodied vulnerability" as a pedagogical practice. Within this essay, I explore the interrelationship of race, gender, and embodiment (or, the performance of self). In addition, I reflect upon the pedagogical exercise-enacted over the last seven years-of asking students to see me and name what they see to illumine how social identities are read alongside context/location, as well as in relation to other assumed identities. Due to the historical and contemporary framing of Blackness and femininity-as paradoxical in popular culture and popular constructions of Blackness and queerness as antithesis-my queerness is undetectable in predominantly White classroom spaces. This essay documents my experience working through this contentious reality and offers the practice "embodied vulnerability" as a feminist practice and educative tool for mediating how the body is understood in the classroom, invoking identity and mobilizing the body in teaching/learning processes.
authors.affiliation: a Oxford Community Arts Center , Oxford , Ohio , USA.
authors.forename: Dominique C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Hill
mesh_terms: D001741:Black or African American / Q000523:psychology*; D005178:Faculty / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D012650:Self Disclosure; D000072339:Sexual and Gender Minorities / Q000523:psychology*; D012933:Social Identification; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D013663:Teaching
keywords: Black femininity; Vulnerability; auto/ethnography; embodiment