A Hijab, A Dog, and Many Histories: Wonders of Intersectional Assemblage in Memphis

Abstract

As part of a larger interdisciplinary arts-based research course, we engaged in walking as a material and relational inquiry in order to disrupt privileged and normalized understandings of class, race, settler colonization, and narratives of othering (Springgay & Truman, 2018). Borrowing Jasbir Puar’s (2012) frictional analysis, that brings together intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage, each of the walks sought to “foreground the mutually co-constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender, and nation” (Puar, 2012, p. 49). As we walked Memphis’ historic neighborhoods, we experienced varying states of wonder as intersecting identities shifted with each step in and out of centers and margins or what Min-Ha (1991) terms as “horizontal vertigos” (p. 15). In this paper, we share two of our “horizontal vertigos” that shaped our experiences walking Memphis neighborhoods and that informed our understandings of the frictional movements in the assemblage and the event-ness of identities.

Bodies of Walking: Trans-Materializing the Experiences of Racial Harassment

“…Walking to school for Maha, who wears hijab, enables her body to become a Muslim body outside. Hijab becomes an affective and material vitality on the body materializing the difference that “radically striate[s]” the margin (Minh-Ha, 1991, p. 14) of bodies, matter, space, almost as if “the scarf took the walk” (Salem et al, 2019, p. 243) and not Maha. As we walk from her house to school and back, we partake in varying states of wonder and wander, taking in and being taken by bodies, objects, spaces, and feelings that shift our bodily capacities with each step in and out of centers and margins.…”

Moving and Mattering with the Wall-ed Feelings: A Posthuman Movement between Possibilities and Impossibilities of Becomings in Educational Research

“…They were aware of how public opinion perceives Muslims, their representation in media as having the "visuality of suspectness" (Heath-Kelly, 2012, p. 69), therefore being dangerous. Salem, Bailey-Tarbett and Nordstrom (2019) argue that the headscarf as a cloth of prejudice and intolerance, "strips the human body from its humanity to deem it disposable and foreign within the politics of belonging" (p. 243).…”