Peer-Reviewed Articles

“Becoming Queerly Responsive: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for Black and Latino Urban Queer Youth” by Ed Brockenbrough, 2016.

This article draws on an ethnographic study of a Black and Latino queer-focused HIV/AIDS resource center in a city. It reframes the concept of pedagogical work, and explains how pedagogy–defined as “a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced within and among particular sets of social relations–occurs regularly outside the walls of schools.

Brockenbrough builds on the work of other sociologists and defines culturally responsive pedagogy as having three main factors:

  1. That it is based in a respect for the cultures of students, and not starting with a “deficit-oriented perspective” of minority students” that is common throughout the history of K-12 schools
  2. That it draws on students’ existing modes of knowledge
  3. That pedagogues actively pursue modes of caring that are recognizable to the students and seek to counter marginalized students’ neglect in schools.

Brockenbrough acknowledges the unique opportunities and dangers for queer youth of color living in urban spaces. In his findings about the HIV/AIDS resource center, he found that this outside of school space enacted culturally relevant pedagogy in three persistent ways:

  1. Its organizational mission was focused on people of color. Its mission aims “to improve health and wellness in communities of color through intervention and services with an emphasis on LGBT programming.” Focusing explicitly on Black and Latino people and aiming to have cultural competency and respect drive the organization allowed this specific HIV/AIDS resource center to differentiate itself from another queer center in the city whose mission and programs had no specific focus on people of color.
  2. Its sexual health education was sex-positive and taught specific strategies for safer sex–from dental dams for analingus and cunnilingus to workshops on erotic massage to trips to a sex shop. Frank and up-front conversations focused on safer sex and pleasure were a huge contrast to the local school district’s sex ed program which focused on condoms for heterosexual vaginal intercourse and overall encouraged abstinence. It also differed from the local schools’ Gay Straight Alliance which was known as more of a social space and didn’t provide the actual information needed for queer youth to have safer sex.
  3. Its engagement with House Ball culture–a form of Black and Latino queer social networks in the form of families and inter-house competitions in categories like “vogueing” and “reading” that started in Harlem in the 1960s–and its programming inspired by House Ball culture allowed youth to enjoy the performance of ball culture in a youth-focused space. It focused programming directly on queer Black and Latino youth. It also helped create familial relationships between staffers and youth in the institutional culture of the HIV/AIDS resource center, building on a sense of care and intimacy that contrasted from a more “paternalistic model of service delivery.”

You can read the full article here.

“A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project” by Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter and Whitney Strub, 2014

This article focuses on the necessity for queer communities to preserve their own histories and narratives. Because LGBTQ people exist as a minority that is independent of the biological family, the authors write, “each generation faces the task of inventing a life for itself, often without the help of family or extended relations.”

In focusing on Newark, New Jersey as a case study for the erasure of queer people, the authors explicitly focus on racial minority populations: this city, unlike others that have gotten scholarly attention for their white-middle class gay communities, has been a city with a black-majority and working-class population. Thus, tracking the history of queer populations in Newark cannot be done in the same way as in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Manhattan: it was not enacted through activist groups but rather through alternative communities, such as “discos, ballroom houses, church-based communities, and other sides of solidarity and sustenance.” In creating the Queer Newark Oral History Project, the scholars and activists and community members set out to write the history of LGBTQ people across generations in Newark.

In describing their many goals, including remembering the history of brutality against LGBTQ people and the courage of queer people, creating a resource for artists and historians, and most importantly reaching Newark’s queer youth: “a cross-generational sharing of local queer history and knowledge was especially important at this moment, because the AIDS crisis had wiped out a whole generation in Newark and left the next generation of queer youth with few people to turn to for guidance and mentoring.”

The project culminate in a full-day public celebration of queer Newark history in 2011, focused on sharing knowledge across generations. It was focused on education, and no academics spoke. Instead, panelists of different age groups of queer Newarkers shared stories, photographs of the community were shown, and footage from a movie about Newark lesbians’ activism was played. The event got wide media attention and made black and brown queer and trans bodies visible and celebrated. The group aims to continue collecting and sharing stories, focusing specifically on charting the histories of Newark’s queer clubs going forward, listening to local queer people’s needs and desires in creating a set of public histories that can guide young queer people of color whose experiences of sexuality, race, gender, spirituality, and economics are all interconnected.

You can read the full article here.

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