674993
research-article2016
CSCXXX10.1177/1532708616674993Cultural Studies ↔ Critical MethodologiesFranklin-Phipps
Article Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 1–8 © 2016 SAGE Publications Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1532708616674993 csc.sagepub.com
Entangled Bodies: Black Girls Becoming-Molecular Asilia Franklin-Phipps1
Abstract Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming alongside Massumi’s reading of A Thousand Plateaus (1992), I explore how Black girls become educated in the molar assemblage1 of schools: students, teachers, classrooms, bodies raced and gendered by the practices of White schooling. Through readings of narratives of Black girls, I examine how fixed notions of Blackness and girlhood are disrupted by girls becoming-molecular.2 Finally, I consider how Black girls are affected by White schooling spaces and how Black girls’ bodies shift and change schooling spaces by existing in them. Keywords Black, girlhood, schooling, becoming-molecular, molarity For several years, I have been a graduate teaching fellow at a large public university in the Pacific Northwest in a state that has been historically hostile to people of color. I teach undergraduate education classes made up mostly of young women transitioning from official girlhood to enter college and move toward imagined and hoped for careers as elementary school teachers. They are both becoming-girls and becoming-women because of their proximity to both molar categories.3 Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of becoming is an optimistic engagement with the possible of the in-between, an emphasis on relations and connections across particular, shifting, and multiple organizations of bodies. I use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming here as it happens in relation to assemblage(s), which are the composition of bodies—persons, things, objects, and particulars. In this case, the assemblage is the school, understood broadly as in any given school, there are multiple assemblages intersecting and overlapping. Becomings happen in relation to particular organizations of bodies and could be otherwise. Deleuze and Guattari offer this description of becoming-girl: The body is stolen first from the girl: stop behaving like that, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re not a tomboy, etc. The girl’s becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history or prehistory upon her. The boy’s turn comes next, but it is by using the girl-opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated for him too. The girl is the first victim, but she must also serve as an example and a trap. (p. 277)
The girl is a girl in relation to the way that she is constituted, and the way history is imposed on her. I am compelled to use this concept to think through the role of race in
constitution of girls and the ways histories are mediated by race, along with gender and class. “Becoming begins as a desire to escape bodily limitation” (Massumi, 1992). In one of the classes I teach, I often have a young Black woman. She is always the only one. I am always the only one in my classes, too. I am attentive to and concerned with how her stories might diverge from my own, resisting dualisms or easy narratives that undermine the particularity of Black girls. At the same time, it is challenging to get outside of these. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) stress, “the only way to get outside of dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo” (p. 106); this space in-between is that of becoming. This article is an attempt to pass between the dualisms that discipline and manage Black girls in school, producing their bodies in opposition to norms and disallowing fluidity, nuance, complexity, and shifting subjectivities. Here I explore how Black girls in White schools affect and are affected when attempting to access education and be schooled. Over the course of a year, I interviewed two young women several times about living in White communities through their K-16 education and attending predominantly White schools. I recorded and transcribed the interviews, reading and re-reading them for divergences, connections, and overlaps in their affectivity around race and gender. My goal was not to affix meaning but to engage in stories that 1
University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
Corresponding Author: Asilia Franklin-Phipps, Department of Education Studies, College of Education, 5277 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 Email:
[email protected]
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Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
2 are not at all representative of Black girls’ experiences but to hesitate in stories that have mostly gone untold in their specificity and particularity. I resisted dualisms in my own becoming, to think with theories of difference and multiplicity while never being released from the very same dualisms. While engaged in this work, I was also conducting ethnographic fieldwork at a local high school, with an interest in thinking through the assemblage(s) of a high school and how Black girls are affected and affect high school spaces, people, policies, and practices. Although those of us who care about the lives of girls intellectually grant that Black girls are multiple, fluid, and dynamic, we continue to acknowledge and recognize only a few kinds of Blackness in Black girls, thus (re)producing the fiction that Black girls can be but one thing and that one thing must be abject4 (Butler, 1993; Scott, 2010). The Black girl who is not abject is an exception, and this exception effectively reifies the rule, thereby producing her as (at least in part) abject. This logic relies heavily on binary thinking. Although desiring a broadening of what Blackness can become, I am also cautious because such broadening still necessarily excludes those Black girls who do not or cannot fit, even when the category expands. Making the parameters of inclusion more flexible simultaneously reifies exclusion by continuing to privilege some over others. Blackness and girlhood positions Black girls in the molar assemblage. The molar assemblage is the taken-forgranted organization of people, objects, and texts that make up the social world or “the World as We Know It”5 (Massumi, 1992, p. 105). Deleuze and Parnet (2007) explain it this way: “The assemblage is a multiplicity, which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes, and regions—different natures” (p. 69). In the molar assemblage, it is difficult to see all the moving parts that comprise it as we typically focus only on what we are used to seeing. From this perspective, Black girls are becoming in relation to the things, people, places, and policies that affect them, while affecting the assemblages of which they are a part, namely, classrooms, schools, and institutions. Becoming allows for a thinking and imagining outside of the “stuckness” of race and gender and the stories that we are told about both, allowing for lines of flight toward other, different potentialities where Black girls can be shifting, fluid, and multiple. Becoming facilitates an engagement with the particularity of Black girls, not as representative but as specific, while acknowledging that molar assemblages fix and re-fix Black girls’ bodies in particular ways that are deeply entangled in skin color and hair texture. Historical economic imperatives and social hierarchies rely on the marginalization that comes with those physical traits and schools operate in relation to these same imperatives.
Blackness as Agent We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions or passions with it or to join with it composing a more powerful body. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 257)
The shifting ways that Black girls bodies can affect and be affected in relation to entering an assemblage is becoming. Becoming amplifies, makes space for noticing, and emphasizes what a girl can do in a given assemblage; it is a recognition that affective power is fluid even as it is mediated and constituted by race and gender in relation to the school and all that makes up the school. Becoming is not inherent in the girl, but a result of a variety of factors acting in concert to effect particular kinds of becomings for particular kinds of bodies. This way of thinking about girls is one of accounting for girls’ agency without undermining or minimizing the structural forces that move and affect her. How do Black girls’ bodies enter into composition with other bodies in a school? A Black girl goes through school affecting others by her very body. This Black body does not belong, and it effectuates all sorts of disciplining practices that exist to make all young people docile but is particularly harsh on her. These practices—such as gender norms that position White femininity as the aspirational ideal (Lei, 2003) and discipline structures that over-scrutinize Black bodies (Morris, 2016) —converge to affect Black girls in ways that are both raced and gendered. A Black girl surrounded by Whiteness is in some ways privileged by her proximity to Whiteness; although, she is not becoming-White despite accusations of becomingWhite, which is always already impossible. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert that there is no becoming-majoritarian, becoming-man. There is only becoming-minoritarian, becoming-other. All becoming is a becoming-minoritarian. When we say majority, we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian: white-man, adult-male, etc. (p. 291)
As Black girls, they are multiply positioned on the wrong side of ontological binaries. “There is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987 p. 291-92). In a group of White kids, at a White school, a Black girl in composition with the right configuration of bodies may receive a temporary pass and have the penalty of her
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Franklin-Phipps Blackness suspended because she has been vetted. This pass is fragile, dependent on things outside of her control. At any point assemblages can shift and her Blackness is fully restored. She might know when this happens. She might not. If she does know, she will be aware that all the space taken up by Black girls’ bodies is contested and unstable; there is no ease or rest because her precarity is always shifting in relation to school, home, and girlhood life. Living in spaces such as these requires creativity and negotiation with other bodies and things. In this way, girls create lines of flight, creative lines of invention away from fixity, away from binaries and molarity, and toward becoming-molecular.
Becoming-Girl, Becoming-Black [The girl] is a line of flight. Thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, ages, sexes; they produce molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 276-277)
Passing through, around, and above dualisms is the ontological imperative for the body infinitely marginalized, simultaneously invisible and hypervisible, depending on the assemblage she enters. For Black girls, race, gender, and adolescence fix and perpetually discipline the body on the wrong side of dualisms that construct girls as either/or, which affects how girls can live and be in the world. The affective power of bodies shifts in relation to the assemblage. Some assemblages make space for more affects, others allow for less. Making bodies docile in schools requires eschewing complexity, nuance, multiplicity in favor of stable, and fixed subjectivities at the apex of race and gender. When viewing the world through the lens of dualisms, Blackness is defined as different from White. Girls are defined as different from boys. This binary logic is the foundation of the often uncritical and stratified social world that makes up schools. Schools are additionally policed because adolescence must be further constrained and managed. These contexts limit the freedom of girls. “Molarity presents itself as stasis, but like becoming-other it is in reality a productive process: a making-the-same” (Massumi, 1992, p. 106). The molarity of the schooling context makes resisting a girlhood policed against White feminine ideals or norms difficult; the possibility of destruction is one that is not overstated. The delicate balance of de-territorializing girlhood in a Black adolescent body requires creativity and entering into productive relations with the people, objects, places, and spaces that make this possible. Particular assemblages in relation to bodies—feminism, art, an encouraging teacher, a punk band—can open up life-spaces for becoming-molecular.
Precluding Transparency The narratives here are drawn from interviews, conversations, and reflections about Black girl becomings in White schooling spaces. I call these narratives “transparencies” to acknowledge and foreground the incompleteness of the narratives and the reluctance of my analysis, which may serve to fix moments that have since shifted significantly. Transparencies are clear, smooth sheets that have specific but multiple uses; they are used almost exclusively in schools and classrooms (although not as often in these days of PowerPoint slides and Smartboards). Transparencies recall my own secondary schooling experiences. I would feverishly copy projected notes, directions, and images, and then become disillusioned once the teacher changed them too quickly. In addition, I call these partial narratives “transparencies” because I am interested in not only how stories about Black girls becoming in White educational spaces link, overlap, and intertwine with other Black girls’ stories but also where these narratives break off and diverge into alternative and new possibilities for thinking girlhood. When transparencies are stacked on top each other, their differences are amplified while the lines of sameness or similarity become blurred. As much as you might try to line up the parts that are the same, it becomes impossible to do so. Even the lines that are the same are contested. Transparencies call our attention to difference, and difference is what I am interested in exploring and thinking through in this article. I seek to honor the specificity and differences of these different girls while also engaging how they are similarly positioned, imagined, and located in a world where positioning, imagining, and locating have material consequences on and in their lives. In the following sections, I will introduce the stories of Rose, Frankie, and Maya, which illustrate differences.
Transparency 1: Becoming-Molecular—Rose’s Narrative The girl is like the block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each opposable term, man, woman, child, adult. It is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is becomingwoman that produced the universal girl. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 277)
The class took place in a loud garage in the automotive technology, engineering, and robotics building. While this class was all girls, the other classes in the space were made up of mostly boys. The teacher wrote a grant so that the girls could have a class focused on girls developing mechanical skills with other girls. “I just want them to be comfortable with this stuff. They can do it too,” the male teacher told me gesturing toward the machinery and tools. “If the boys were here, they’d (the girls) just stand around talking and the
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4 boys would do everything.” He had already determined what the girls would do given a different class assemblage—one that included the bodies of boys. This determination was made prior to meeting the specific girls in the room; many of these girls had not yet matriculated when he established how they would behave. The girls clustered around a half-finished chicken coop. It was made out of scrap wood and mostly completed. A blonde girl in a hoodie showed off her sparkly, pointy manicure and shared with her friend where she got them done. So and so was quitting choir and someone got a B− on a math test. Someone got a bug bite and another girl left her sweater in Chem. There were about 10 girls in the garage—some were holding power tools and others were watching as the girls sawed, pounded, kicked, and hammered the wood transforming into a chicken coop. Rose, a Black girl with loose, curly hair cut in a bob, picked up the staple gun. She was the only Black girl in the class. She pushed her hair roughly out of her face to position the wood. I stood to the side. “I like your glasses” she said and began stapling wood pieces together, occasionally pretending like she was going to shoot her friend in the face. Her friend squealed, performing somewhat but possibly anxious about an accident. The teacher told the class that I was a graduate student but nothing else. The teacher insisted on calling me Ms. Franklin, unwilling to disrupt the molar assemblage standards that require compliance with the dualism that separates adult from child. I was positioned above students due to my adult status, even though they had no idea who I was. They were curious about me for a second, but quickly lost interest to focus on their chicken coop. The girls floated around the garage, picking up power tools and putting them down to continue conversations, doing dance moves, and gazing at their eyebrows in hand mirrors—commenting on arches and filling them in with eyebrow pencils. The Black girl Rose and her White friend Kelsey walked away from the chicken coop as several other girls checked to see whether the chickens would have a place to perch. Kelsey pushed her own long, straight, dark hair out of her face and fluffed the Black girl’s cropped curls. She pulled down the curls and let them bounce back into place. Rose stood staring off. Kelsey said, “Let me straighten your hair, just once!” The Black girl shook her head and replied that she would not straighten her hair. She said something about a long-term plan involving her hair. Her friend asked if she could do Rose’s hair several more times. Rose let her friend continue to bounce the curls up and down, flattening the curls between her manicured hands. Kelsey sighed, “I wish I had your hair.” The Black girl shook her head, “Believe me, no you don’t.” The teacher brought out a bucket of slate gray paint. The girls shrieked and ran to get brushes—excited to paint and finish the chicken coop. Rose is one of the popular girls. She is a cheerleader and has many friends. In her classes, she is with the group
having the most fun. She is often the only girl of color in her group of friends and, despite the close relationships she has with them, she is often subject to additional racialized scrutiny about her appearance. Even when Rose is being complimented for her features—skin color and hair texture—she is reminded of her place as The Black Girl. Although Rose appears to comply with high school race and gender norms, she asserts her resistance to molarization by refusing to straighten her hair, and forcing the White girls in the class to encounter hair that is different from their ideal. Although Kelsey said that she wanted to have hair like Rose’s, Rose knows that Kelsey does not actually want her hair as evidenced by Kelsey telling Rose that she wants to change her hair so that her hair is closer to beauty ideals that are unattainable, particularly for Black girls. Kelsey imagines that her friend would look prettier with straight her that went down her back, as Rose would be closer to White beauty ideals. It is confusing to Kelsey that Rose would refuse to make her hair straight when it would take just a little bit of effort. Kelsey even offered to do it for her. Although girls increasingly have choices, they continue to be disciplined toward particular choices to re-territorialize girlhood and resist molecularity. Kelsey, White with long brown hair is closer to the ideal of beauty that values Whiteness and the features associated with Whiteness. Rose’s refusal to be as “pretty” as she can possibly be opens up a tiny space for new possibilities for beauty and selfexpression less reliant on White beauty norms. Although Kelsey eventually accepts this, it is confusing to her and serves to undermine the molar boundaries that discipline what girls should do with their bodies. Rose’s adamant refusal to be pretty and rather become something else is a becoming-other in a “revolutionary sidestepping” (Massumi, 1992), a micro-movement.
Transparency 2: Frankie’s Narrative I met Frankie at a talk at her university. She was an undergraduate who attended the discussion alone, asking cogent and thoughtful questions of the panel. She approached me after the talk. We spoke for a bit and exchanged emails. In the fall, she sat in on my undergraduate course. She was the only Black woman in the class and usually sat in the back. She vibrated anxiety and discomfort. She was early every day, and every day I noticed that the seats next to her filled in last. I notice this because it happens to me quite often. After class, we talked about the university and her challenges graduating. I was working on writing a dissertation proposal and asked her questions about her life. She wondered whether I would be interested in interviewing her weekly. We met over the course of the term and recorded our conversations. Frankie discussed feeling like she did not belong quite a bit. The molar assemblage of school positioned her
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Franklin-Phipps existence as non-belonging—she was a queer, Black girl from Iowa—and all at once, she embodied not belonging. Frankie went to Black Student Union meetings and felt the space was too heteronormative. Frankie struggled in her social groups because she felt her experiences as a Black woman were discounted or dismissed when others only wanted to meaningfully engage in her queer identity. She did not grow up around many Black people and her parents and teachers provided little insight into the world that she faced as a high school girl and later as an undergraduate student. Frankie began to feel less pinned to the feeling of not belonging when she began taking courses with Black women, taking coursework in Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies, and joining clubs and forming social connections with other students of color. This had not been possible in her high school. Although these lines of flight allowed Frankie a bit more freedom when she entered particular compositions of motion and rest, this greater awareness and ability to name, articulate, and challenge her positioning—becoming a feminist kill joy6 (Ahmed, 2010) and becoming-molecular—made the other parts of her life more challenging.
but was rarely perceived so. She was used to understanding herself in terms of fixed, imposed subjectivities: too Black, too White, too queer, and too anxious. Despite being one of very few Black women in the biology major, and having been successful in her high school science courses, she understood the absence of Black and Brown students as a further indication of her not belonging. This doubt was reinforced by regular slights and dismissals from mostly White, mostly male colleagues, a pattern she had become used to in high school. She was often avoided when it was time to pick lab partners, and when she did speak, her contributions were often ignored or dismissed by her male colleagues. The only reason she continued in the major was that she really loved science. Low grades further produced her as unsuitable for the space. As Massumi (1992) notes, “minorities are expected to become equal-in-theory but in practice less powerful versions of the same: children of the Molar Man. Neonormalities” (p. 122). Frankie lost legitimacy because she could not pass as a less powerful version of the same, she could not be a neonormality. But despite her academic difficulties, she was opening up a life space (Massumi, 1992):
It is as deplorable to miniaturize, internalize the binary machine, as it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us from it. It is thus necessary to conceive of a molecular women’s politics that slips into molar confrontations, and passes under or through them. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 275)
Becoming performs an operation on collectively elaborated, socially selected, mutually accepted and group-policed categories of thought and action. It opens up a space in the grid of identities those categories delineate inventing new trajectories, new circuits of response, unheard-of-futures and possible bodies such that have never been seen before. (p. 101)
Through self-education and alternative social spaces, Frankie was undermining her molarization and becomingmolecular, but this molecularity was further disciplined when she returned to more molar spaces like the biology lab, heteronormative male–dominated study groups, and science courses where she would once again be the only Black girl. Although this produced Frankie as anxious and depressed, she did feel that she was gaining something from managing these disparate campus spaces because she did not quit, going on to graduate and continuing to opt into radical, activist spaces that challenged molarity in the forms of capitalism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. Molar confrontations require extra work that at times becomes unmanageable; Frankie took on additional labor that was not recognized, or maybe was unable to be recognized, as it did not correspond with the labor of dominant groups. Her grades slipped, and even though she accomplished much more than many undergraduates, this traditional yet incomplete measure of her accomplishment allowed her to be imagined and imagine herself as incompetent. Which girls need to work “harder than anyone else”? How hard Frankie must work is related to her positioning as Black Girl Other. Frankie understood herself in terms of ontologies of being—she was either smart or she was not smart—and in moments she thought of herself as multiple
Although Frankie did graduate, she will not continue to study biology. She is working in a Detroit school and teaching kids science. I receive her thoughtful emails wondering about the injustice in the school and whom we can blame. She is politically engaged in both her life and work, while limited in the ways she can move in the constrained space of the predominantly White schools she inhabits. Frankie’s activism not only emboldens her in classrooms and in social spaces but also increases the scrutiny, judgment, and isolation that she feels as The Black Girl. In one interview, Frankie described a habit of counting Black people in a space. When asked about the number of Black people in any given class or school context, she only needed a minute to answer: “three,” “two,” or “just me.” The number, always low, often produced enough anxiety to keep her still, silent, and stuck, learning and becoming differently than her White male peers. The minute Frankie got a chance, she moved to a place where she could not count anymore. Frankie is willing to give up her specificity to be able to identify with a group. She is okay with not belonging, as long as she does not also have to be the only Black person in the room. She is aware that she is opting out of dominant notions of monetary success by opting into an alternative life space. She is okay with being the only queer-identifying person in the room and she is okay being the only person
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6 who grew up in a small town in the Midwest. In this, she is creating her own life space and becoming-molecular, as the molar assemblage would produce her as inert, fixed in her place as a struggling queer Black girl.
Transparency 3: Box Checked—Maya’s Narrative Black girls are affected by White schools and schooling in multiple ways. Maya, a Black girl from a small town, who also attended White schools as one of very few Black students, enters into composition with other people, things, policies, and spaces that affect in overlapping but distinct ways. Maya moves with racial fluidity in an attempt to unstick from molar assemblages of race and gender, in gestures and moves that are simultaneously de-territorializing and re-territorializing. Maya makes space for creativity where she can, but is often re-disciplined away from becoming and toward stable categories of being. I got to know Maya when she was a freshman in the undergraduate course that I taught. She was the only Black woman in the class, but there were a few other women of color. She was just 18. Our course was very focused on issues of race, which Maya seemed particularly uncomfortable discussing. When she did speak, she said things that dismissed issues of race and positioned her to identify more closely with arguments that uphold the status quo of White supremacy. A few semesters later, I needed to interview someone for a class I was taking; her way of being in my class was intriguing and I wanted to know more, so I contacted her and she excitedly said yes. We met in a room on campus. Maya was particularly affected by consistently being associated with the negative aspects of Blackness, often by her White peers. Although she acknowledged and critiqued racist views, she understood herself in terms of racist and sexist notions of Blackness and femininity. Maya grew up in a small town with few people of color. Her mother, with whom she grew up, is White and her father, with whom she has a distant relationship, is Black. I asked Maya how she identifies herself and she strongly asserted that she identifies as, “a mixed, multiracial woman.” In certain instances, “I identify as Black, but never African American because I don’t like being considered African American.” Maya described her understanding of herself, which is fluid, shifting, and sometimes unhooked from racial binaries. Maya identifies as Black in particular spaces to be in solidarity when there are small numbers of people of color, in response to an overt racial incident, or in Black spaces such as a Black Student Union meeting. Such identification is temporary and necessary in contexts or assemblages where racial fluidity is unintelligible, unrecognizable, or intolerable. When she was bullied and finally beaten up in elementary school “for being a Black girl with a Russian name,” she was quick to disassociate herself with Blackness. She told her mother that she
did not want to be Black anymore, and recalled her mother comforting her by saying, “You’re not just Black. You are Native American, you’re French Canadian, you’re all of these different things in one person.” It would be easy to understand this statement as simply dis-identifying from Blackness and in line with anti-Black sentiment that determines a person’s value in direct relation to their degree of perceived Blackness. Although anti-Blackness may be entangled in her response, I think that it is much more complicated. Her mother’s reminder of her multiracial identity undermines the very premise of the bullying—that she is Black—while also pushing against molarization that would fix Maya in only Black girl-ness and all the negative associations that come with that. In staunchly claiming her multiracial identity, Maya concedes a kind of Black that shifts in relation to particular assemblages, and resists the molarization of the binary machine that cannot recognize inbetween, settling on not Black. This binary machine would put her on the side of Black, because of her relatively darker skin, her hair texture, her facial features, and her Black father. Maya’s stance insisting on fluidity is not without consequences, as while it might afford Maya greater power in some contexts, it can deplete her in other contexts, as she is generally perceived and treated as though she is Black regardless of how she self-identifies. Maya was furious when a White girl in her class, where Maya was one of two people of color, suggested that Black people play the race card too often and that she, as a White person, was tired of having to watch what she said around Black people. Maya’s ambivalence around Blackness seemed to immediately disappear. In the retelling of this story, Maya felt that the comments were directed toward her and the other Black girl in the class, and Maya aligned herself with the other Black girl in protest of the insensitive comments. Although Maya resists molar assemblages that position her as either Black or White, in the space of a classroom made up of White students, Maya is in closer proximity to Blackness than she is to Whiteness and is vulnerable to racial reduction and dismissal. In this particular composition of bodies and things, Maya takes a position that seems in opposition to many of her previously stated views. She is Black in a classroom filled with White students and lead by a White teacher in a predominantly White school where topics of race are central to the course. This particular combination of bodies and practices affects the degree of Maya’s racialization. Furthermore, Maya’s Blackness affects the classroom space: the tirade of White resentment, the anxiety of White students who are required to discuss race in the presence of Black students, instructor competence at facilitating cross-racial dialog, and the kind of learning that becomes possible and less possible are affected by the presence of Black bodies. When Maya goes to a Black Student Union meeting, she feels uncomfortable at what she perceives to be less
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Franklin-Phipps sensitivity to White people: “My mom is White, so I’m not going to say anything bad about White people.” In a space dominated by Black bodies, Maya feels greater proximity to Whiteness. Maya’s insistence on racial fluidity gives her some freedom in some spaces, but she simultaneously foregoes connections that might allow her freer movement in other spaces. Maya attempts “to leave, to escape . . . to trace a line” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 36) away from the constraining and reducing binaries of race within the molar assemblage. She is becoming-molecular in relation to the molar assemblages that rely on the logic of static and stable bodies. Maya’s physical body is an important part of these shifting assemblages in which she can move across the continuum of race. Maya has light skin and wears her hair straight (or she did at the time of our conversations). In relation to her White peers, Maya has a greater degree of freedom of movement when compared with girls with dark skin but is disciplined by Black girls, who she perceives as also trying to racially reduce and fix her in the molar assemblage in addition to her White peers. Both attempt to discipline Maya’s racialization from different points on the molar assemblage. As Massumi (1992) describes, “When bodies refuse molarity or simply overstep the limits of molar sense, they are abandoned to unabashedly disciplinary minidespotism (prison, reform school, and so on)” (p. 126). When recognition by a disciplining institution requires a fixing, Maya complies with little fanfare. When I asked Maya when she identifies as Black, she responded, “In class or when I have to check a box.”
Afterthoughts: Becoming-Black, Becoming-Girls When thinking through how race and gender intersect to fix Black girls, particularly in White school spaces, there are micro-resistances that affect the broader assemblage and are potentials for difference and newness. Massumi (1992) argues, Becoming is always marginal, a simultaneous coming and going in a borderland zone between modes of action. The place of invention is a space of transformational encounter, a dynamic in-between. To get there, one must move sideways, through cracks in accepted spatial and temporal divisions. Charging straight ahead may be necessary and effective at times, but as a general principal it is as self-defeating as uncritical acceptance of reform. Revolutionary sidestepping is called “transversality.” (p. 106)
Recognizing “revolutionary sidestepping” opens up space for a loosening from molar assemblages and becomingmolecular. Those bodies most disciplined—adolescent, Black, girl—are likely models for resisting molarity.
Resisting the tendency to be fixed in relation to the controlling images of Blackness (Hill Collins, 2000) becomes much of how and to what degree Black girls are able to move (affecting and being affected) in schools. Black girls’ experiences are different from those of White girls and from each other’s, and Black girls have different relationships to the molar assemblage that produces them as the same, despite these obvious differences. Although I’m not dismissing what may link Black girls, here I am interested in thinking about a particular in-between: the space between what we can recognize and name and what might be. Engaging rather than flattening these differences encourages new connections and links through the experiences of Black girls, rather than the usual practices of causing us to disappear. Thinking and writing in ways that work to acknowledge multiplicity pushes against the dualisms that place Black girls on the deviant side of each binary. Black girls “create only by making possible a becoming over which they do not have ownership which they themselves must enter; this is a becoming-woman affecting all humankind, men and women both” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 106). Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes 1.
This term is coined by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to refer to a composition of bodies that assemble to produce the same. According to them, the molar assemblage, in producing the same, resists disruption that might allow body’s greater freedom. Thus, the molar assemblage of the school (and other institutions) means one in which bodies move in ways that are predictable and regulated—furniture is arranged in much the same way, students learn, and teachers teach—all in much the same way. Disruption of those norms is regulated by rules, policies, and practices which are difficult to recognize and, thus, resistant to change and difference (Massumi, 1992). 2. This term also coined by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is used to mean a fluid, dynamic movement toward becoming less affected by the regulation of the molar. 3. These terms refer to the social categories that regulate and produce particular kinds of being: woman, man, Black, White, girl. These categories come with particular logic and assumptions. They are also categories that are compelled and reproduced by the molar assemblages. 4. Both Darieck Scott (2010) and Judith Butler (1990) use the term with overlapping but distinct. Scott’s use the term emphasizing the historical weight of slavery and anti-Blackness on the subjectification of Black peoples. Butler uses the term to
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Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
8 describe those bodies that “don’t get figured as lives” (Meijer & Prins, 1998). Both uses of the term influence my thinking about the material effects of embodying unintelligibility. 5. “The World As We Know It” in Massumi’s (1992) work means the molar formation of the school and world that provides the context for the school, the taken-for-granted “existing structures” that regulates and orders bodies. 6. Ahmed (2010) explores how feminism precludes, critiques, and challenges particular notions of joy and happiness on her blog “Feminist Killjoys” and her book titled The Promise of Happiness.
References Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York, NY: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York, NY: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. New York, NY: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogues II (Rev. ed., European perspectives). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. (Rev. 10th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Lei, J. L. (2003). (Un)necessary toughness?: Those “loud Black girls” and those “quiet Asian boys. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 34, 158-181. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (A Swerve ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meijer, I., & Prins, B. (1998). How bodies come to matter: An interview with Judith Butler. Signs, 23, 275-283. Morris, M. (2016). Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in school. New York, NY: The New Press. Scott, D. (2010). Extravagant abjection: Blackness, power and sexuality in the African American literary imagination. New York: New York University Press.
Author Biography Asilia Franklin-Phipps is a PhD candidate in critical socio-cultural studies in education at the University of Oregon. Her research work concerns how Blackness and gender entangle in schooling and education.
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