Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard (review)

Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard inhabits the intersection between African American, feminist, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) literacy, composition, and rhetoric research where Pritchard hopes to call forth a field of study called Black Queer Literacies. "Literacy" takes on a capacious and shifting definition in this text, reaching far beyond simple reading and writing. Pritchard's definition of literacy is rooted in the work of Sojourner Truth and Paulo Freire:

literacy is understood as the myriad ways of meaning-making that are contextualized by sociocultural conditions. Among the literacy activities employed toward that meaning-making are more traditionally regarded ones such as a reading, writing, speaking, and listening, as well as other literacy performances that occur alongside or external to those traditional literacy activities. These 'other literacy performances' refer to literacies that emerge off the page as well, such as sense-making, discernment, and methods of encoding and decoding various signs and symbols we encounter in our everyday lives.

(19)

The expansiveness of this approach is apparent from the prologue wherein Pritchard offers five vignettes which narrativize his own life experience as a Black, queer, feminist, cisgender man who makes meaning as "a learner, teacher, scholar, artist, activist, and advocate" (1). These vignettes signal the importance of life stories in this text's exploration of literacy and the ways in which literacy and meaning-making emerge off the page.

As Pritchard turns to the life stories of his Black LGBTQ research participants, he specifically examines literacy through the twin poles of literacy normativity and restorative literacies. Literacy normativity is used here to describe those uses of literacy that "create and impose normative standards and beliefs onto people whom are labeled alien or other through textscapes" (28). Through these standards and beliefs, literacy normativity inflicts harm, "steals emotional resources from people, wounding them through texts" (24). We see literacy normativity in the ostracization of young Black queers whose reading habits render them simultaneously queer and 'not black enough;' within rigid interpretations of the Bible which condemn LGBTQ identities; and in the estrangement of Black LGBTQ people from texts and resources that would educate them about their histories and communities. The damage and violence done by literacy normativity highlight the danger of "treat[ing] African American, LGBTQ literacy, composition, and rhetorical studies as mutually exclusive" (33). Indeed, one of Pritchard's most meaningful interventions into the field of literacy, composition, and rhetoric here is his critical attention to the intersectional nature of literacy, its acquisition, its utility, and its role in identity formation, affirmation, and expression. By channeling discussions of raced, sexualized, or gendered experiences with literacy as separate and distinct issues, much scholarship in literacy, composition, and rhetoric neglects the compounded experiences of Black LGBTQ people whose lives are impacted by the racialized nature of their gender and sexual identities.

This separation of race, sex, and gender from literacy is challenged here by Pritchard's attention to the creation of restorative literacies in the face of the damage caused by literacy normativity. Restorative literacies are those practices that Black queers employ "as a means of self-definition, self-care, and self-determination" (24). These practices foster self- and communal love within and among the Black LGBTQ people who utilize them to counter messaging that might otherwise make such love feel undeserved or out of reach:

Restorative literacies are the way in which one creates a space outside of oppressive institutional structures and individual acts of violence. … Restorative literacies do not seek to reconsolidate power; rather, restorative literacies occur when one displays or asserts control over one's life and voice through various literacy acts. Restorative literacies are very much dependent on one's self-identification and positionality, which means that individual and communal acts of restorative literacies are situated differently and evolve across time and place.

(33–34)

This negotiation of power, like the participants' subjectivities, shifts in response to changes...