Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin (
2018)
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Abstract
This article explores black girls and women’s experiences with school, police and state disciplinary torture in the ‘afterlife of slavery.’ More precisely, this work explores the punishment, torture, captivity, annihilation and ultimate genocide black girls and women are subjected to by white supremacist, antiblack, hetero-patriarchal, hetero-sexist, and heteronormative school staff, police and state forces in public schools and beyond. A few research questions are explored: What are black girls and women’s experiences with punishment, torture, captivity, annihilation and genocide by police and state forces in public schools and general public spaces and consciousness? And, what are the gendered, racialized and sexualized dimensions of violence black girls and women experience at the hands of U.S. state and state apparatuses? This text exposes the danger of silencing just how lethal and grotesque these disciplinary technologies are and the gendered, racialized and sexualized nature of violence black girls and women are subjected to in these material and imaginative spaces. At the same time, this text illuminates black girls and women’s sonic and physical resistant strategies that challenge and disrupt oppression within a larger structure of antiblack genocide in the United States. Black girls and women proactively resisting the disciplinary torture of state and state forces are ‘scenes of subjection’ and, simultaneously, scenes of subjectivity. Largely, this article asserts that these spaces reveal the essential nature as well as the potentiality of radical social transformation for black life, autonomy and freedom. Finally, this article uses Moorish-Palestinian extraterrestrial epistemology to suggest how these sites also reveal the necessity for dark matter communities to settle for nothing less than their freedom and move towards an intergalactic consciousness and peace and love state of being to recalibrate—whether astrally, figuratively, and/or literally—to the interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic regions.