A/Wakening, Healing and Caring in the Pandemic borderland(s): theorizing an Emancipating, Pleasurable and Restful Black Femme Form in Gender Studies

Sammanfattning: In this study on form within the field of Gender and Fem(me)inist Studies I build on, and work with, works created by black women and femmes, as well as femmes and women of color to explore their ways of theorizing through form, as well as finding my own, with roots from all the beautiful experiments lived and written about by these folks. As I sketch out these theories and texts and bring them to the Swedish context in which I write I am breaking new ground for research on blackness, femme-inist theory and form as well as methodologies here. Using an approach of mixed methodologies – formulated in the concepts of femmebodimotive writing and other pleasurable methodologies – I use my body and its emotions oozing from it as a tool for theorizing in the intersections of gender, sexuality, blackness, care and its connections to water, kinship, language, pleasure and rest. I tend to various intersections of these to find new ways of swAfrican (Swedish and African Tanzanian) Black, femme, borderland(s) being in the world. The first chapter sketches out these borderlands as they connect in my body and its surroundings. It is highly inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Spill in its form and will invite you to think care with me as I wrap my hair in queer kangas (colorfully sketched out in a KangaProject) over which we wander to the Kiswahili coast and take a plunge in black waters. This is where the second chapter starts, in the biomythographical waters, waves and currents carried inside us, and by us, as well as the waters and currents connecting the worlds corners. All water carries the currents of histories of genders, sexualities, kinship and languages and this, as well as the un/realness of the black bodies in focus, is intimately explored with the help of Omise’ekeNatasha Tinsley, Christina Sharpe, Sara Ahmed, a few other theorists, dictionaries and me. And as the waters runs up and down, from side to side, the waves and wakes travel further in time. These waves travel all the way into sleep, and into the third chapter. Upon entering this final chapter, you find a small visual constellation of these sleep waves. Here, rest and pleasure are in focus and I think with and through Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s installation of Black Power Naps as a way to think blackness and femme-inity and their movements as theory, joy and as connected to pleasurable methodologies. My explorations lead me to the importance of form and texture for knowledge production as it may show other dimensions of theoretical thoughts and problems. In highlighting this I also show how the master (thesis) form may be approached differently by Black femmes of color and thus illuminating what issues these bodies have in white academic spaces.