Reading and Engaging with Kacen Callender's Moonflower through Intersectional Pedagogies
Title and/or Affiliation
Meghna Prabir, Christ University
Presenter Bio
Meghna Prabir is an Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Christ University, India. Their current research and intersectional pedagogies focuses on intersectional queer ecologies. Prabir is currently Section Editor, Cultural Studies, of the Springer Encyclopedia of New Populism and Responses in the 21st Century.
Session
Panel: Teaching Black Speculative Fiction
Location
Zoom
Start Date
28-6-2024 1:15 PM
End Date
28-6-2024 2:30 PM
Abstract
While the premise of intersectional pedagogies is that race is included by default in the forms of marginalization it engages with, educators from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities are undoubtedly still marginalized, and sometimes invisibilized, in the global context. Even when texts by queer BIPOC authors such as Audre Lorde are taught, the authors’ queerness and Blackness are typically downplayed in favor of more universalizing liberal humanist themes. This study examines the ways in which privileged perspectives can be decentered in the process of pedagogical engagement with literary texts. The study employs Kacen Callender’s novel, which is seminal in the contemporary context since it engages children with vital topics relating to race, gender, and mental health, in understanding how inclusivity and diversity can be actively focused on in pedagogy rather than being tokenist footnotes in academia at large. As Audre Lorde famously says, we do not live single-issue lives, and our concerns, especially as educators, must focus on intersectionality: the understanding that all oppressions are interlinked. Developing such an understanding in learners may begin with creating the awareness that children require autonomy and agency to determine their gender identity and well-being: Callender’s Moonflower (2022), for instance, establishes encouraging grounds for examining gender dysphoria through a child narrator’s perspective. Further, the book also provides immense scope to be read in terms of actively dismantling hegemonic epistemologies in terms of the adult/child binary. Since the novel is also framed within the dystopia genre and engages with a severe pandemic that dismantles education as we know it, young readers also have the potential to learn from it in ways that they find engaging and empowering rather than oppressive.
Reading and Engaging with Kacen Callender's Moonflower through Intersectional Pedagogies
Zoom
While the premise of intersectional pedagogies is that race is included by default in the forms of marginalization it engages with, educators from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities are undoubtedly still marginalized, and sometimes invisibilized, in the global context. Even when texts by queer BIPOC authors such as Audre Lorde are taught, the authors’ queerness and Blackness are typically downplayed in favor of more universalizing liberal humanist themes. This study examines the ways in which privileged perspectives can be decentered in the process of pedagogical engagement with literary texts. The study employs Kacen Callender’s novel, which is seminal in the contemporary context since it engages children with vital topics relating to race, gender, and mental health, in understanding how inclusivity and diversity can be actively focused on in pedagogy rather than being tokenist footnotes in academia at large. As Audre Lorde famously says, we do not live single-issue lives, and our concerns, especially as educators, must focus on intersectionality: the understanding that all oppressions are interlinked. Developing such an understanding in learners may begin with creating the awareness that children require autonomy and agency to determine their gender identity and well-being: Callender’s Moonflower (2022), for instance, establishes encouraging grounds for examining gender dysphoria through a child narrator’s perspective. Further, the book also provides immense scope to be read in terms of actively dismantling hegemonic epistemologies in terms of the adult/child binary. Since the novel is also framed within the dystopia genre and engages with a severe pandemic that dismantles education as we know it, young readers also have the potential to learn from it in ways that they find engaging and empowering rather than oppressive.