‘Standing in the kitchen’: race, gender, history and the promise of performativity

Threaded with racialized and gendered pathologies, Black folx wrestle with a normative gaze that understands them as irrational, unintelligent, and deserving of constant surveillance. In this way, Black folx are expected to model postures of whiteness that agree with the wardrobe of anti-Blackness. In this manuscript, we take up the pedagogical work of what Denise Taliferro Baszile called critical race testimonies as a form of counter storytelling to intervene on the normative gaze. In doing so, we explicate the embodied potential of performativity for Black students, against the normativity of anti-Black discourses.