Rupturing the Whitespace

Abstract

In this article, I enter into a poetic engagement with scholars Audre Lorde, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, and Cynthia Dillard and to explore the ways in which I seek to “rupture” normative understandings and representations of teaching and research praxis in higher education. It is an unapologetic reclamation of Lorde’s concept of the Erotic as an act of what Dillard calls (re)membering, and Sullivan’s working of queer reading practices that encourage us to expand our scholarly vocabulary beyond the “whitespace”—beyond what English prose is able to capture. In this work, I offer my own body as data as well as a framework for assessing praxis alignment through embodied analysis, answering Lorde’s call to privilege the rightness of “feeling” as true knowledge. This article is a love letter to Black feminist cultural production and a radical reimagining of the metrics of oppression that have historically been used to disconnect our bodies and minds in the name of science and best practice. It is a call to celebrate the liminal spaces that we occupy with the fullness of ourselves, and to trust our own authoring of knowledge, experience, and wisdom as educators, researchers, and scholars.