Resisting racialization: subjectivation of women of color in and beyond school

Based on poststructuralist theories of subjectivation and racialization, this article examines how experiences of racism at school and (digital) resistance practices interact in the subjectivation of young women of Color. Based on two case studies, each consisting of a biographical interview and a social media post, insights into different forms of racializing subjectivation in school and social media and possible resistance strategies are generated. Racializing subjectivation is summarised as a gradual phenomenon in which subjugation and resistance interact over time.

Schools are one of the crucial places where racism is (re-)produced (Leiprecht and Steinbach 2015).Research has shown that everyday practices in schools perpetuate institutional racism (e.g.Gillborn 2008;Gomolla and Radtke 2009), shaping the school life of students of Color by racial othering (Hummrich et al. 2022;Phoenix 2021).Although female students are specifically targeted by racism and sexism, the main body of knowledge on racism still focuses on boys (Evans-Winters and Equity 2017, p. 420).The study of girls' experiences and agency is thus a desideratum, particularly in the era of Black Lives Matter (Brown et al. 2017(Brown et al. , p. 1834)).The framework of subjectivation enables the analysis of such experiences of marginalization: It is concerned with how individuals become subjects in terms of power, here against the background of racism and sexism.However, as relevant as the relationship between subjectivation and racism might be, it still has received little attention in the field of education (Kleiner and Rose 2014).The few existing studies show how students pick up racial and gendered attributes and identify with them, but also how they reject racialized subject positions (Chadderton 2018;Phoenix 2005;Youdell 2006a).While such practices have mainly been observed in situated school and classroom interactions so far, there is an even wider gap in the literature on resistance against racialization outside the school context, such as on social media.However, scholars have observed that social media can potentially shift discursive boundaries when they function as a context of counter-storytelling by otherwise 'marginalized' voices (Moncrieffe 2020;Reynolds and Mayweather 2017).
We aim to address these research gaps by focusing on the experiences and practices of (former) female students of Color in the context of school and social media.We analyze biographies and posts of young women who 'write' against racialization on social media with an interest in how and when they 'become' a racialized subject and reject racialization over time and in different social contexts.We therefore ask how racializing subjectivation is processed and focus on how racialized subject K positions are rejected.In what follows, we first outline the state of research and the theoretical framework (2).We then outline the data and the methodology (3), before presenting two case studies (4).The article concludes with a discussion that provides a deeper understanding of the ways in which subjects emerge through and resist racialization in education (5).

Subjectivation, racialization and resistance at school
So far, few studies have dealt with race, gender and subjectivation in schools and in the classroom (Chadderton 2018;Phoenix 2021;Youdell 2006a).Butler's emphasis on discursive norms and intelligibility in becoming a subject is especially used by scholars to observe how schools construe the ideal student, finding that this student is white, middle-class, male (Youdell 2006a, p. 97) and heterosexual (Kleiner 2015).From this perspective, schools have proven to be involved in processing racialization, e.g., when addressing students as "racial subjects" (Chadderton 2018, p. 115).The study of subjectivation in school has proved how students of Color are disciplined and normalized (Youdell 2006a), construed as a non-normative Other (Phoenix 2021) or even as a threat to school orders (Hines-Datiri 2015, p. 127) along norms of femininity and masculinity, blackness and whiteness.
But despite its powerful character, studies also show that students challenge racialization by how they talk or 'talk back', how they wear their clothes, and-intended or not-thereby undermine the dress code of the school (Youdell 2006a, p. 43) or challenge silencing and being rendered invisible (Clonan-Roy et al. 2021;Langhout 2005;Terstegen 2023).Focusing on Black female students has reveiled how they feel perceived as "dangerous bodies" and subvert this narrative through paintings and texts (Evans-Winters and Equity 2017).Rendered as aggressive and "too loud" in school, "loudness" also becomes a source for them to resist norms of whiteness (Fordham 1993).Studies such as these exemplify the paradoxical nature of resistance for female students of Color, who are specifically affected by racist and sexist discourse: Educators sanction behaviors such as loudness, perceiving it as confrontational and aggressive, while these "are actually behaviors that successful African American women have identified as necessary for success in combating both racism and sexism in society" (Kemp-Graham 2018, p. 32).Due to the finding that in schools, "colour-blind racism" (Stoll 2013, p. 16) is entangled with "gender-blind-sexism" (Stoll 2013, p. 16), the marginalization those students face, their experiences and practices often remain unseen (Crenshaw et al. 2015).
This raises the question of a possible 'beyond' of resistance and its role outside the school context, to which studies of students' biographies give a first hint: They demonstrate how subjecthood emerges in complex processes inside and outside school, in an ongoing process of learning to become a subject along race and gender lines, by also showing how such positionings are negotiated and even rejected (Hummrich 2009;Phoenix 2005;Rose 2012).

Subjectivation, racialization and resistance on social media
Social media is increasingly being discussed as a site of protest against racism.As argued in Cultural Studies, media are both the terrain and the means of enforcing hegemonic clashes (Marchart 2018, p. 134).Being "discursive arenas" (Winter 2010, p. 16), social media refer to the social order and act as its "re-generators" (Hoffarth et al. 2020, p. 8) by reproducing and challenging it at the same time.Thus, racism and sexism are not only combated but also perpetuated here, as evidenced by racist, anti-feminist and misogynist hate speech (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas 2021).Social media can therefore be places where agency and even resistance are articulated, but not without committing to normative orders of the intelligible.They even evoke new modes of subjectivation (Bettinger 2022a;Paulitz 2014).For agency, this means that it's bound to technological possibilities and the rules of the platform, which the subject must obey, implying "[...] the possibility and necessity to make oneself perceivable as a subject and thereby in turn to be recognized as a subject" (Paulitz 2014, p. 4).
New modes of subjectivation raise the question of new modes of resistance to racialization.There is some evidence that young people raise their voice against racism on social media and organize protest there (Brown et al. 2017;Moncrieffe 2020;Winter 2010).Reynolds and Mayweather (2017) show how, after a racist incident at a university in the Midwest of the USA, students reject racist invocations through writing social media posts.Hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter play a crucial role in this form of protest by linking individual posts, generating attention and creating community (Reynolds and Mayweather 2017).Through their digital presence, they create a "subaltern counter-public" (Fraser 2001, p. 129), open up opportunities for civic engagement for racialized subjects and give them the power to create narratives (Reynold and Mayweather 2017, p. 286).Such counter-narratives also expand the range of 'possible', intelligible subject positions and are accessible to individuals and collectives who identify with them (Andrews 2004, p. 2).Focusing on female students of Color, again little is known about the ways in which they raise their voice, how they experience movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, and how their identities and positionalities are affected by this (Desir and Seraphin 2022).

Theoretical framework on subjectivation, racialization and resistance
We now unfold a perspective on subjectivation that integrates racialization and resistance and allows us to examine their interrelation.Butler has further developed the idea that subjectivation takes place between mastery and submission (Foucault 1982) and through discursive hailing (Althusser 2006), as she understands subjectivation to be an unfinished performative process, in which the subject emerges through maintaining and simultaneously shifting discursive norms of intelligibility (Butler 1997(Butler , 2001)).As shown above, Butler's theory has helped with empirically investigating how discourses of race and gender unfold their powerful yet productive force on student subjectivity in situated school practices.With this perspective on the 'beyond' of school, we focus on how the subject emerges through performative acts over time, while at the same time taking seriously that discursive hailings compete K with one another according to different norms and social contexts (Phoenix 2005, p. 106).
With Hall's theory on racism, in turn, we can explicitly investigate the subjectivizing power of racist discourse.By understanding racialization as subjectivation, he has demonstrated how discursive distinctions between "us" and "them" are interlinked with the history of European colonialism and white supremacy (Hall 2001, pp. 132 ff.).His deep analyses of racialization in media representation (Hall 2001) and of the effects on identities from the perspective of the ones who are rendered as the racial "other" (Hall 1994a) are a crucial point for us to observe such racializing subjectivation through social media.
When it comes to the question of the extent to which resistance is possible, there is a well-known poststructuralist skepticism, since the subject is understood as an effect and not as the precondition of power relations.Consequently, there has been a vivid theoretical discussion about the agency of subjects and the (im-)possibilities of resistance (Gräfe 2010;Hauskeller 2000;Hoppe and Rose 2022).The paradox of agency here stems from the fact that subjectivation is exactly the "fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency" (Butler 1997, p. 2).Racialization can only unfold when there's a certain degree of identification with the distinct (racialized) subject position (Hall 1996, p. 6).
We want to approach this discussion in a productive way with an analytical understanding of resistance that assumes agency while also engaging power relations.This means moving "past an understanding of intent and agency that is the property of an a priori, rational, self-knowing subject, but retain[ing] a subject who can act with intent" (Youdell 2006b, p. 519).To have agency, however, does not mean that resistance is itself an attribute of the subject.Rather, it is a discursive practice that can only be understood within a particular context (here: school/social media), since agency only "exists in the differential and competing relations among the historical forces at play" (Grossberg 1992, p. 123).When we speak of resistance in terms of racialization, we therefore refer to the ways in which racialized subject positions are rejected, hegemonic norms such as whiteness and heteronormativity are subverted and/or when racism/sexism are interrogated.This includes the shift of meaning in what Butler calls resignification (see also Rose 2012) as well as in counter-narratives.

Data and methodology
In order to analyze the interplay of racializing subjectivation and resistance, we refer to findings of the ongoing qualitative research project "Widerständige Frauen?Schriftliche Artikulationen rassistischer Diskriminierungserfahrungen in Bildungsinstitutionen und ihre biographische Bedeutsamkeit [Resistant Women?Written articulations of experiences of racial discrimination in educational institutions and their biographical significance]" 1 .The data consist of Instagram posts on the resistance of 1 Project lead: Merle Hinrichsen, Betül Karakoç-Kafkas and Saskia Terstegen.
women of Color against experienced racialization in school as well as biographical interviews.The sampling includes two steps: First, in an exploratory online ethnography (Kozinets 2019), we collected 60 Instagram posts (texts, images and videos) on experiences of racialization at school.Second, using theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss 1999), we conducted six biographical interviews (Schütze 1983) with women who had written some of these posts.We also asked them to provide us with posts that were particularly meaningful to them, and which we talked about during the interview.All women had gone through the German school system and were between 18 and 30 years old; most of them are currently attending university, and those who are not are planning to do so.
Interview and post are analyzed separately before being related to each other case-by-case.This enables the exploration of subject positioning in different discursive contexts when combining elements of narrative analysis (Schütze 1983) and positioning analysis (Bamberg 2022;Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann 2004).Both strategies overcome the idea of a 'true', authentic self by focusing on how the subject emerges in and through stories told in terms of power, context, and performativity (Bamberg 2022, p. 27;Dausien 2002, pp. 176 ff.).We understand biography as social construction, which is based on and (re-)produces social norms and powerful discourses (Alheit and Dausien 2009, p. 286).It can be described as a self-technology, as the 'modern' subject has to comply with the cultural constraints of biographizing in order to be intelligible (Buchner 2018, p. 123).Biographical articulations are particularly well suited for analyzing subjectivation because they offer an insight into subjective ways of dealing with social norms and expectations as well as to past and present experiences and hailings (Kleiner and Geipel 2022, p. 214).
The biographical narration in the interview is an interactive, constructive performance, which results from the space, time and social situation in which it was carried out (Gregor 2018, p. 94).Since the positioning of interviewee and researcher is embedded discursively, the interview cannot be assumed to be an ungendered and unraced, neutral space (Chadderton 2012).The request to tell a life story by researchers who are positioned as female and some of them as unquestionably white makes a powerful hailing as it positions the interviewees as subjects who experience discrimination and protest against it.
The Instagram posts, conversely, represent everyday practices of digital biographical articulations, that are characterized by multimodality (Bettinger 2022b;Heinze 2013).They emerge in a 'mess' of experiences, expected audience and the technological opportunities and restrictions of the social platform.As "digital artefacts" (Bettinger 2022b, p. 123), the posts can be read as a discursive practice of counternarratives (Hall 2001).They are situationally composed, but at the same time they are temporally and spatially decoupled through storing and public access (Heinze 2013, p. 8).
Using two contrasting case studies, Elena and Adeeba2 , which we can only unfold in a very condensed way here, we explicitly focus on racializing subjectivation and the practices of resistance that are intertwined with it.

Case study Elena
Elena is in her early twenties and attends university in a large city in eastern Germany.She positions herself as "mixed".Her father comes from Senegal, her mother was born in Germany but has one Indian parent.Her parents separated when Elena was two years old.She grew up with her mother in an affluent neighborhood, where she also attended school and graduated with the Abitur (highest secondary school qualification in Germany).
The interview In the interview, Elena positions herself as the daughter of migrants from countries in the global South, which in Germany is linked to discourses about a 'migration background'.For Elena, this positioning is related to experiences of racialization, which she first became aware of in primary school: "At my school I was the only dark-skinned girl and that's when I was confronted with racism for the first time [...] ehm.and that's when I had the problem more often, i.e., I had very strong pigment spots [...] and because of that I was often bullied, and simply because I looked different from the rest.ehm and, at that time, I cut off my hair and.then I had the feeling that I had to be a man in order to be somehow strong, to be more masculine.and eh exactly, I always wanted to be called Paul, then I played football and only dressed masculine and stuff" (Interview Elena, 1/23-35) By referring to being the "only dark-skinned girl", Elena construes school as a predominantly white space in which she is rendered a visible "other".She makes sense of this experience through her "different" appearance (especially her pigment spots), which calls victim-blaming discourses to mind.The classification of the practices as "bullying" suggests they were shaped by direct, supposedly 'mean' actions.Elena's response of being hailed into the subject position of a 'weak Black girl' is to cut off her hair, to reject 'her' name and instead take on the name Paul.By also changing her clothes and behavior, she affirms notions of strength associated with masculinity when striving to become an intelligible and belonging subject.
Although this allows Elena to maintain a sense of agency, she continues to struggle with racialization by her classmates.The fact that she neither tells her teachers nor her parents about this, points to feelings of shame and limits of the sayable.It is only when Elena reports an assault to a teacher in fourth grade that the classmates responsible are expelled.
The transition to middle school, despite ongoing racism, opens up alternative possibilities of positioning for Elena, which she links to "more immigrants" among the students.She makes friends and is increasingly accepted as a leader of her peer group.Here, the racialized discourse of Black as 'bad' shifts as she comes to the conclusion "that it is not bad to be dark-skinned".
In high school, Elena comes to terms with femininity anew.She wears a "feminine" hairstyle again and dresses "permissively".Here again, she interprets her appearance as a reason for discrimination and violence.She recounts a sexual as-sault that initially caused her to withdraw.The fact that she opens up about this is certainly also due to the interview situation and the positioning of the interviewer, who as a woman wearing a hijab may herself appear to be potentially vulnerable to discrimination: "In the beginning it really got me down and then because of that, after a year or so, I just started to get involved and got more involved with feminism and ehm.exactly, then I just started to understand it all more, and I wanted to, it was never that I didn't want to be a woman, but I always wanted to be strong and I always had the feeling that the man is strong and not the woman [...] and then I just started to understand.that it's not like that, but that society often portrays it that way" (Interview Elena, 2/25-35) Elena presents feminist theory as a way for her to newly classify her experiences and her former denial of the subject position as 'woman', namely that being strong and female isn't mutually exclusive.She concludes that such norms are socially constructed.The realization that she is not to blame for what happened to her leads to a change of action: She talks to her parents, reports the sexual assaults to the police and develops a need to publicly show "that women are strong too and that many things that just happen towards women in this world are not okay" (Interview Elena, 25/22-24).Instagram becomes an experimental space for Elena, where she posts about women's rights and racism.She presents posting as a way to express her feelings and process her experiences but also as a chance to help other women.

The post
The post was published in Elena's Instagram feed in 2020 and tagged with #BlackLivesMatter.The video from a front-camera perspective shows her reading one of her poems out loud.The video's text description says Elena feels prompted by the "current situation" to share her experiences but also that she does not want to "attack or offend" anyone.
In the poem, Elena articulates a sense of not belonging because of the namecalling, bullying and the everyday racism she is constantly exposed to at school: "Jokes about my curly hair or my dark skin were quite normal.And as the only dark-skinned person?you act like you don't care: ha ha ha, very funny".In what follows, the poem addresses a "white" counterpart: "Did you miss the point.white and Black people don't go the same way [...] being = white is a real privilege nowadays, protest and provocative Instagram posts is not just nagging.when police officers beat up Black people because of their skin color, what am I talking about (2) we are killed because of the color of our skin.while the white man worries about his hairdo in corona times (3) whether white or Black you have to understand.and really take a look.because it can't continue like this.no" (Post Elena, 1/34-2/10) The post criticizes white supremacy, structural racism and police brutality from a racialized subject position targeted by these things.Protesting is construed as necessary to counter the existential threat of violence, which the privileged "white man" does not realize at all.Resistance is presented as fundamental for the ones who collectively suffer from racialization.The poem addresses also the privileged K to join the struggle against racist oppression in solidarity.The shift from a silenced victim to being member of a Black resistance movement is also reflected in Elena's statement to be "proud now, oh so proud of my dark skin" (Post Elena, 3/1-2), which reverses racial stereotypes (Hall 2001, p. 340).
Triangulation Even though the experiences of racializing subjectivation and practices of resistance point to similarities in both articulations, the available subject positions significantly shift over time and depending on the context: In the interview, Elena traces how she is repeatedly positioned as 'weak Black girl' at school and how she first remains silent, then subverts to heteronormative-masculinity and later identifies with norms of a Black femininity while racialization is referred to as constant challenge.In the post, the focus is on the individual and collective effects of Black Lives Matter discourse, where Elena claims the subject position as an activist who publicly protests racism and sexism.

Case study Adeeba
Adeeba is also in her early twenties and studies in a large city in northern Germany.Her parents migrated from Lebanon to Germany in the 2000s.After their divorce, Adeeba grew up with her mother, who remarried when Adeeba was four years old.In seventh grade, she started wearing a hijab.One year after her graduation with the Abitur, she was accepted into university.
The interview Unlike Elena, Adeeba only briefly mentions experiences with racism.This may also reflect a skepticism that a white researcher is interested in her story of 'discrimination and resistance', which she articulates during the preinterview conversation.She emphasizes how "normal" her childhood was in terms of attending kindergarten and making first friends in school while at the same time highlighting specific "stages" as relevant: This includes her decision to wear a hijab, which she makes against her parents' will in seventh grade, and a scholarship designed for high-achieving students with a 'migration background' in middle school.Adeeba attributes her experiences of racialization in particular with her hijab.Still today, she feels the constant pressure to "prove herself as a person" by creating what she perceives as an alternative image of (Muslim) femininity.As she perceives herself as 'other' at school, writing becomes a resource in striving for intelligibility: "I developed this very early on that writing is really so yes so my thing and ehm I also have to say.eh I always found it quite nice somehow or it also gave me a certain kind of #satisfaction# (laughing) because of course I had already understood somehow at that time that I am ehm not so completely perceived as German by others [...] and then it was but then it was not so easy for me to write.[...] and then it was just like that, as I stood there and was the only one of the whole class, a class that really consisted of ninety percent Germans, who got an A in German out of all of them, then that made me proud, [...] it also made my parents proud" (Interview Adeeba, 11/31-12/18) Writing here becomes a practice which subverts racist discourses on citizenship that position Adeeba at the margins of the intelligible.What she describes as "satisfaction" and "pride" refers to a struggle with intelligibility: By proving herself to be a good-even the best-student, Adeeba fulfils the norms of a hard-working middle-class femininity and positions herself as 'worthy' of belonging.
Adeeba's school performance remains outstanding in middle school.At the same time, she's excluded by her classmates, who she thinks reject her religious life like not drinking alcohol.Conversely, through the scholarship, she feels encouraged to perform texts in front of an audience, which she has previously only posted on social media.She now performs them regularly on stage.Through the feedback to her first political text, which she wrote shortly before the right-wing extremist riots in Chemnitz, Germany in 2018, and the counter-movement #wirsindmehr ("we are more"), Adeeba realizes the outcome of her work: She empowers those who are marginalized but also receives attention from the ones who are not.As a result, she writes more texts about "what is wrong in this society" and gives the example of how the refugee movement of 2015 was dealt with in class: "In a room filled with people with migration background, you cannot create lists of pros and cons as to whether we will take in refugees or not" (Interview Adeeba, 39/7-10).Adeeba is struck by these racialized discourses, which make her feel like she does not belong.But despite her outrage, she remains silent in class-a reference to the limits of the sayable in school, which are challenged with the published texts, e.g. on Instagram.Adeeba emphasizes the potential to reach many people and respond to current discourse despite being aware of the racism and hate speech she faces.

The post
The post is published in Adeeba's Instagram feed in 2021.It is announced by a close-up photo of her and presented on three slides.The text description articulates anger about the decision by the German Federal Council that female civil servants are prohibited from wearing a hijab and criticizes the underlying racist narrative that portrays Muslim women as dangerous foreigners.
In her poem, Adeeba expresses the fear of being othered as a woman with a hijab and collectively declared guilty of crimes: "When I read the word hijab in the news, something inside me tightens.When a crime happens, it is immediately followed by the thought that hopefully we won't be blamed again" (Post Adeeba, 1/3-10).In encountering this everyday experience of criminalization, Adeeba distances herself from her mother's strategy, who, ashamed, hides her 'foreign' language, and declares how tired she is of fighting for freedom and justice: "I don't want to accuse you anymore and I don't expect you to apologize.I want change and responsibility.I don't want to think about my existence every time you look at me questioningly, I don't want to keep wasting my potential.I don't want to prove that this happens every day.I want you to see that and stand by us.Because the problem is not only what is said and what happens, but that your silence always prevails.We belong to you as you belong to us.Because you know what?In the end, it is not the 'otherness' that hurts, but that we were almost always almost the same" (Post Adeeba, 2/50-3/25) K Adeeba here questions the prevailing order and calls for "change" and "responsibility".The subjectivizing consequences become clear when she questions her own existence.By naming and rejecting racializing hailings and countering them with a call for solidarity, Adeeba asserts agency.In doing so, she raises her voice as part of a marginalized collective, whose pain is located in the repetitive failure to actually become "the same".

Triangulation
The ways in which experiences of racializing subjectivation and practices of resistance are articulated here are similar.In the interview, Adeeba positions herself as a good student despite being exposed to racialized and gendered discourses on citizenship and victimization.To be intelligible in contexts like the scholarship help her to critically explore such norms while at the same time, being 'different' but striving to sameness proves to be the paradox ongoing project of her subjectivation.This is also evident in the post.The post also reveals more about Adeeba's (school) experiences with racism and shows a very clear positioning as a member of a marginalized collective, who is addressed to fight white privilege.

Discussion
Based on these findings, we now discuss some heuristic considerations about the modes of racializing subjectification and possibilities of resistance over time and in social contexts.The case comparison highlights the distinct vulnerabilities in the process of becoming a racialized subject.Along norms of blackness, whiteness, gender and religion the young women are positioned differently in a complex interweaving of racialization and marginalization: For Elena, who is negatively affected by anti-Black racism, skin color and hair become markers of difference from an early age on.The past raced and gendered hailings she emphasizes concerning her school time reveal how she eventually identifies with a potentially non-intelligible racialized subject position.Her experiences of being exoticized and sexualized as a Black woman (to the point of assault) have led her to struggle for a sense of agency to this day.Conversely, Adeeba highlights how practices of religification (Ghaffar-Kucher 2012) by educators and her peers are directed against her: Especially her hijab is interpreted through a discursive frame of whiteness and anti-Muslim racism.Looking back, Adeeba refers to hailings in school as ethnicized and silenced 'Othering', where religion is construed as incompatible with 'Western' norms.Her current positioning within a frame of migration and otherness paradoxically cites difference and becomes a source of agency at the same time.
As the analyses demonstrate, the uneven distribution of opportunities to articulate intelligibility between subject positions (Villa 2010, p. 260) do not only affect (im-)possibilities, forms and strategies of resistance to racism and sexism.It also highlights the relevance of the distinct social context: In both cases, school is the first place where racializing subjectivation is experienced as particularly powerful and where corresponding hailings are rejected.As can be reconstructed here, racialization is above all challenged by subtle (physical) practices.This and the reluctance of the young women to openly criticize racism in school indicates the constraints of what is sayable.The ways in how school opens up a space for resistance become particularly evident in Adeeba's case: By becoming an 'overachiever' in school, school performance subverts discursive notions of victimization and silencing.Complying with school norms construes a position as "good-Arabic-student-subject" (Youdell 2006b, p. 512), which nevertheless remains entangled in the fight for intelligibility as it competes with hegemonic norms of whiteness.
The cases clearly demonstrate how the experience to become intelligible is interrelated with resistance in contexts beyond school (scholarship, peers, family, etc.).Social media represent such a context, which proves to be particularly important for both women to examine and resist the conditions of their oppression (Hinrichsen 2023).Here, the stories that produce the self as racialized, sexualized and in this sense vulnerable, simultaneously legitimize the subject to speak out-even on behalf of those who cannot.At the same time, resistance on social media reveals processes of normalization (Bublitz 2014) and is bound to hegemonic notions: This becomes obvious in how the critique of racism is met with racist and sexist hate speech.The analyzed practices of resistance can therefore be interpreted as embedded in counter-narratives when also taking into consideration findings on the contemporary and historical struggle in (female) Black representation (Bergold-Caldwell 2020; Hall 2001): Resistance in Elena's case is an example of how strategies of a 'Black' resistance challenge racialized media discourse, e.g. by citing "Black is Beautiful" (Hall 2001, p. 340).In contrast, Adeeba's case represents above all the reversal of stereotypes (Hall 2001) through the embodiment of an 'alternative' Muslim femininity.This points to the collective dimension of resisting racializing subjectivation: As Gräfe (2010, pp.304 f.) argues with the example of Rosa Parks, who became famous in the civil rights movement when she refused to give up the 'white' bus seat, Park's resistance only became possible within an existing social movement, which strived for visibility, effectiveness, and authority.Since biographies are part of such discursive practices, they also provide access to the effects of (collective) resistance.
As the case studies show, "sometimes it takes years to talk back" (Butler 2014, p. 179).This supports the finding that resistance is an extremely presuppositional activity, especially for those who are constantly in danger of social deprivation of recognition and loss of meaning and identity (Kollender 2020, p. 81).This notion is particularly applicable to sexism and racism, which empirically prove to be both oppressive here (as they dominate, exploit and de-humanize) and productive (as they are the prerequisite for the subject's existence, even if on the edge of intelligibility).We see the consequence for the analysis of racializing subjectivation in the need to simultaneously integrate the productivity of power in the process of subjectivation and its oppressive dimension (Mecheril 2006, p. 132).Therefore, we want to argue for the understanding of racializing subjectivation "not as an absolute but as a gradual phenomenon" (Hoppe and Rose 2022, p. 211).While its oppressive dimension is a reference to the "Identity reduction" (Butler 2001, p. 92), even a "temporary totalization performed through the name" (ibid.), the productive dimension of racializing subjectivation emphasizes the ability to speak as soon as a subject position has been taken on (Hall 1994b, p. 76 f.).In this respect, the juxtaposition of racialized and marginalized vs. privileged becomes relevant, but also the different gradual, K performative and dependent forms of discrimination expressed in relation to racism.Our heuristic approach to such a gradual understanding of racializing subjectivation therefore integrates subjectivation as an ongoing project in time and context, where biography proves to be a central subjectivizing interface.
We've proposed a heuristic for analyzing the subjectivation of (former) female students of Color, whose resistance is still under-researched in educational science.However, there are some limitations to consider: Firstly, despite the potential of combining interviews with social media (Bettinger 2022b), a further sharpening of the methodology is needed to work out the relevance and interrelation of subjectivizing contexts.Second: We could not elaborate in detail here on the complex (post-)digital logics of subjectivation of social media (Demmer and Engel 2022;Hinrichsen 2023).Further integrating the technical conditions of the platform, comments, etc. into the analysis promises a deeper understanding of racializing subjectivation in post-digital worlds.Thirdly, extending our database may help to further generalize the findings, addressing the possible bias of our sample as to whether it is a certain group who's into the focus of the research on resistance (young adults, high education).Overall, more research is needed to fully investigate the implications for education of the complex of subjectification, racialization and resistance in and beyond school.