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

While reading Eric Darnell Prichard’s Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy, I was transported back to the summer of 2001—the time I went to my first book signing. I was in Davis-Kidd Bookstore in Memphis, Tennessee, waiting in line for E. Lynn Harris—a very popular African American LGBT author—to sign a copy of his book Any Way the Wind Blows. While standing in line, I started a conversation with the person next to me. When discussing Harris’s work and its popularity, the person told me, “He’s the first author I read who let me know that it’s fine to be a black gay man. Because of him, I allowed myself to come out to my family and live a life that is uniquely mine.” This reclaiming a sense of self is at the heart of Fashioning Lives. In examining how African American LGBTQ people tell stories to narrate how they have been hurt by individuals and institutions and the strategies they used to counteract those attacks, Pritchard details how black LGBTQ subjects battle against the harm inflicted on them and “what literacy and love have to do with it” (15). In the process, according to Pritchard, black LGBTQ people remodel their literacies to succeed in a society that uses their literacies to control them.

To frame his research of black LGBTQ literacies, Pritchard theorizes the terms “literacy normativity” as the “uses of literacy that inflict harm” and “restorative literacies” as “literacy practices that Black queers employ as a means of self-definition, self-care, and self-determination” (24). The book then proceeds to detail how 60 black LGBTQ people repurpose their literacies in institutions such as libraries, schools, religious and spiritual spaces, and digital spheres.

In chapter 1, Pritchard examines literacy normativity and restorative literacies to analyze the literacy practices of participants who refashioned their literacy in often dangerous spaces. In the study, the participants note that they face a double bind. They recognize that literacy is empowering for them to shape their identity. Yet, literacy normativity dictates that if others discover that the subject is reading or writing material that would label one as queer, then they risk facing dangerous consequences. To counter this risk, Pritchard notes that participants use restorative literacy through what he terms as “literacy concealment,” or “ways of attempting to successfully navigate from fear and danger toward feelings of safety around literacy practices” (60). Some of those strategies include hiding or stealing books and finding safe spaces such as LGBTQ bookstores, which, in the process, helps them to repudiate literacy normativity.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how literacy normativity creates what Pritchard terms a “historical erasure,” which is “an act of violence” when “institutions and individuals use print and other tools to construct historical narratives that exclude Black queer life and contributions” (103). To transform this literacy normativity, the participants create restorative literacies by connecting with literary ancestors, creating fictive kinship with characters in books, film, theater, music, and other media (129), and connecting with elders—living individuals who, because of age or life experience, have particular wisdom and knowledge about African American queer life and culture (138).

Chapter 3 examines how the participants experience literacy normativity through “spiritual violence,” a phrase Pritchard borrows from Reverend Jimmy Creech. While Creech defines spiritual violence as “any assault upon the integrity and dignity of a person when that person is told that, because of who she or he is, she or he is not loved and accepted by God, and is in fact rejected and condemned by God” (154), Pritchard adds that spiritual violence “harms not just those who have an avowed religious or spiritual identity but also those individuals who are atheists” (154). This literacy normativity results in the silencing of black queers in religious and spiritual spaces and spaces in faith-based traditions. To develop restorative literacies, the participants...