Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Queering of Southern Lines

Abstract

Educational spaces extend well beyond the brick and mortar of a school building. In this chapter, Herman considers a familiar structure of Southern Black culture in the United States as an educational terrain where bodies become central to the production of knowledge and agency. Further, Herman explores Sara Ahmed’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality in which she claims that some bodies are marked with privileges and that those bodies labor to perpetuate those privileges as norms on other bodies. This chapter offers up an experience between a teenage daughter and her parents that speaks to a gendered Black body in a heteronormative world and what occurs when traditions, family values, or what Ahmed considers “straightlines” are disrupted and queered.