Embodied refusals and choreographic criticalities

Purpose This paper aims to describe the work of a group of seventh-grade boys in a middle school superhero storytelling project. In this project, the boys, one of whom identified as Latino and five of whom identified as Black, created a voiceless, faceless, raceless superhero named “Mute.” Using a Black feminist theoretical framework, the author considers how the boys authored embodied moments in the construction of their character and in a basketball scene. The author argues that within the narrated space of the story, embodiment functioned as a critical tool for authoring spaces that thwarted and bypassed dominant social narratives. Design/methodology/approach The white, female, university-affiliated author was a participant-researcher in the “Mute” group’s ten storytelling sessions. The ethnographic data set collected included fieldnotes, recordings and copies of all the writing and images of the group. The author uses this data to conduct a narrative analysis of the Mute story. Findings The author suggests that the group’s authoring of embodiment and choreography in their story makes space outside of the binary stances often available in traditional critical analyses. Instead, the group’s attention to embodied aspects of their character(s) allowed them to refuse either/or positions of such stances and construct a textured reality that existed beyond these bounds. Originality/value Black feminist theorists have warned that critical readings are potentially essentializing, risking a reification of the same systems they hope to overturn. The Mute group’s invention of a superhero character and their use of authored embodiment deflected such essentializing readings to imagine a new, more just (story) world. Thus, the author recommends an increased attention to how students are writing and reading embodiment to fully see the everyday ways they are critically working both against and beyond the social narratives that organize their lives.