“I Wanna be Bad”: Black Joy and Deviant Caretaking

Abstract

The disciplining technologies of schooling overshadow Black women educators’ movement beyond the classroom and shape the logics of spaces meant to encourage their joy and pleasure. A group of Black teachers’ experience negotiating delight while at a strip club inspired the writing of this article. Black queer political theory and Black feminism re-territorialize this moment as both a signifier of Black educators’ erotic embodiment of Black Joy as well as their discursively produced subjectivities as careworkers within the disciplinary arm of schooling. Black Joy is a slippery concept subject to the perniciousness of antiBlack heteropatriarchal capitalism. As a result, conversations about Black Joy in education must include Black educators’ erotic embodiment to confront the traps of capitalism and assimilation that conflate Black Joy with the maintenance of the status quo. Ultimately, Black women educators can practice what I call deviant caretaking to embody new sites and practices of rebellion.