“Queering” #BlackLivesMatter: Unpredictable Intimacies and Political Affects

#BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) has garnered considerable attention in recent years with its commitment to honor all black lives, yet the affective dimensions of this global cause remain largely under- theorized. Within this piece, I explore how #BLM, as a larger sociopolitical movement, works to collectively bind strangers together by transmitting affects that produce a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and belonging. I argue that these affective intensities incite an ‘unpredictable intimacy’ that closely connects strangers to black bodies and intensifies the forces of race, gender, and hetero/ sexuality in ways that—counter to the movement’s purpose— violate the bodies of queer/black women, in particular, via the processes of replication and erasure. I conclude by proposing that, while #BLM aims to empower black lives and build a collective, we remember the political possibilities that affect and queer theories have to offer in order to attend to, and potentially disrupt, the violence that such collectives bring

A Gender Gap in Literacy? Exploring the Affective Im/materiality and “Magic” of Allure with/in a First Grade Classroom

Within this article, I think with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) posthumanist theories of affect and assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to argue that literacy learning within a first grade classroom (NYC) involved allure (Thrift, 2008), or more-than-human technologies of public intimacy that were affectively contagious and seemed to take on a life of their own. By doing so, I contribute a new dimension to literacy-gender debates by exploring how the im/material practices of allure emerge to produce entanglement, bliss, and even violence. While male students’ entangled reading practices disrupted popular assumptions of “failing boys,” thereby making new gendered and literate subjectivities possible, these practices, at times, further reinforced rigid heteronormativities. Ultimately, attending to literacy learning as alluring invites more ethically response-able (Barad, 2007) considerations that take seriously how the forces of gender, sexuality, and race work to animate/contain bodies, spaces, and things, as well as shape the un/making of students as “successfully literate.

Rethinking normative literacy practices, behaviors, and interactions: Learning from young immigrant boys

In light of the historical failure of boys of color in US schools, this article sheds light onto the ways in which normative discourses of literacy and learning shape the experiences of immigrant boys and how they are perceived and defined as un/successful students. Findings indicate that although these boys ”deemed to be œat-risk or œstruggling readers ”were not knowledgeable of prevalent school discourses and interactional sequences, they had sophisticated linguistic understandings and knowledgeable communicative practices. Yet, œgood and œsuccessful literate subjects were defined according to how well a child\u27s literacy behaviors aligned with school norms and expectations. Implications highlight the need to recognize and challenge gender-specific and behavioral norms that continue to disadvantage boys whose literacy practices do not mirror normative expectations