5: I Got It From My Mama: An Autoethnography of Black Women Teachers’ Heritage of Body Aesthetics as Resistance

In this chapter, autoethnography is used to engage the past as a guide to present and future understandings of Black women teachers and the significance of their choices in bodily stylizations and aesthetics as extensions of liberatory pedagogies. The author interprets and connects her own girlhood and womanhood experiences to various ways Black women have historically reclaimed their bodies through aesthetic stylizations and choices in educational spaces, emphasizing the intersections of being Black and woman in educational contexts. Layering inquiry on Black women’s bodily resistance with pedagogy offers a way to (re)member the herstories of Black women through a nuanced lens that retraces and realizes how legacies of aesthetic self-fashioning inspire and influence how Black women teachers resist, heal, and teach through pedagogies of aesthetic adornment and style. This inquiry also presents the opportunity to acknowledge the complexities of respectability politics in schooling contexts and negates generalized assumptions that all Black women teachers are liberatory teachers.