Framing race, sexuality

By: Michelle SiberyThe self-drawn tattoos on Kortney Ryan Ziegler’s arms were birthday presents to herself. On her right forearm rests a guardian angel with a star and on the left a Yoruba statue. It’s meant to be a satire of the perceptions some people have about what “African” people look like, said the 26-year-old Northwestern University doctoral student.

Pushing the conventional boundaries, Ziegler challenges others to question the traditional notions of blackness and sexuality in her academic work. Even her appearance sets her apart from conventional trends. “I think a lot of people don’t take me seriously as a scholar because I don’t dress however we’re supposed to dress,” Ziegler said, donning lip and nose piercings and red- and orange-tipped dreadlocks.

Despite the differences, she found herself fitting in comfortably as one of five students in the inaugural African American studies doctoral program, where students this fall will begin their second year. The new program is just one of seven African American studies doctoral programs in the nation, with the others at prestigious universities including Harvard University, Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley.

The first in her immediate family to attend college, Ziegler was drawn to the progressive way she felt the department approached issues of sexuality and race. Northwestern is not the only school in the country to offer courses in black queer studies but has conducted research in that area. The doctoral program drew Ziegler from her studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she had been studying for a year. Prior to that, Ziegler had earned her masters in ethnic studies from San Francisco State and received a bachelor’s from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Northwestern’s African American studies doctoral program supports her lifelong passion to make films. “Since I could think, or my first memory, I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker,” Ziegler said. Over the summer, she began working on her first feature-length documentary, “still black,” which conveys the stories of two black transgender individuals. The story highlights the intimate details of their personalities as they find their way through a society dominated with heterosexual beliefs about gender and sexuality, she said.

She will continue to work on her film while pursuing a concentration at Northwestern in black queer solo performance artists. After completing the program, Ziegler plans to teach at a university, maybe in the film department, while pursuing a filmmaking career.

Ziegler sat down with The Chicago Reporter to share her experiences as a black academic, lesbian, blogger, filmmaker and as a member of the first class in Northwestern’s African American studies doctoral program.

Have you found any difficulties being black and lesbian in academia?

In [some] departments—I won’t say names—the scholarship they teach is very quote-unquote, ‘Eurocentric.’ And that’s problematic. And if you want to speak up, your aggrieved position is of, ‘Ok, there’s the black person again—always have to talk about the black stuff.’ Or even in classes that are predominantly with people of color, it might be predominantly heterosexual. [Then] there’s the lesbian that always has to talk about gay stuff or something like that. I’m not saying that happens all the time, but it does indeed happen. So that is definitely a challenge. And that’s not unique to Northwestern. It’s at any university, USA.

What would you like to see happen in academic programs when it comes to incorporating these two topics, blackness and lesbianism?

More of an understanding because I feel like no matter what department we’re in, we’re all just trying to figure out human behavior. That’s pretty much all we’re doing and so, if you really want to find value in our research, it’s necessary to incorporate a number of viewpoints because nobody’s right; nobody’s wrong. We just all have different experiences.

What do you think people are missing when they don’t get these multiple viewpoints?

You just have to appreciate that there are different ways of understanding. I think it makes you a better person, to sound very humanistic, but it does make you a better person. It makes you a better citizen. It makes your personal life probably a lot easier because you aren’t so afraid of the other, the unknown, what you don’t know.

Why do you consider Northwestern’s program to be progressive?

Progressive in terms of interrogating what it is to be black. And by that I mean [it offers] different kinds of perceptions of blackness. Sexuality is important, and a lot of scholarship in African American studies doesn’t tend to take in the sexuality question or the class question. And this program does that in terms of the professors and their research and also the courses that are offered. There’s a course being offered next year called Black Feminism Meets Black Queer Theory, and that’s very fascinating.

I’ve never seen that anywhere else. They’re pretty much separate: black feminism and then, black queer studies is new. I think it’s very interesting that the professors bring into dialogue different discourses.

How would you classify black performance or queer performance?

That’s one of the things I’m seeking out in my research. I kind of want to complicate ‘black.’ It is interesting because people ask what I study, and I say black lesbian solo performers. However, one of the artists that I’m studying, she’s Puerto Rican. But in talking about the black Diaspora, she fits into that because she comes from the island of Puerto Rico. So I’m trying to really interrogate what blackness is: What does it look like, what does it sound like, how is it performed? Hopefully, I’ll answer some of those questions in my dissertation.

Can you explain how she fits in?

In the history of the slave trade, slaves were dropped off or transported to parts of the Caribbean, which resulted in the mixing of races. I mean it’s debatable. Many people probably tend to disagree of placing Puerto Rico and Africa [together]. But in my research I do because of the history of slavery and because of the racial mixing. And the whole Caribbean itself is very black in terms of physical appearance and there’s a whole cultural music [from], for the lack of a better word, African influences. I’m looking to question notions of black.

Are you drawing any conclusions?

I’m still leaving myself open to question, and hopefully in the next three years—because I’m going to get out of here in three years—I will have a little bit more of a grip on [it]. And maybe, hopefully, I never do want to know what ‘black’ is. Maybe I will always want to keep it as an open-ended, fluent, malleable category that an artist from Puerto Rico can say, ‘I am from Africa.’ And I can’t say, ‘No, you’re not.’

When you become a professor, what do you hope students will learn from taking your film class?

To learn that you can tell a story without it looking like what you would see on TV or in Hollywood. You can tell a story with no sound. You can tell a story, convey emotion with your hands. [In one of my films] there’s a part where I’m tying a tie with my hands, but it means a number of things in terms of lesbian sexuality with the fingers and things like that. So I would just love to get across that you can break conventions, not necessarily break those conventions and re-ascribe with new conventions, but continue to think about what is film; what is art; how other people interpret films in a number of ways.

You have an award-winning Web site. How has that tied into your academic career?

[My blog] was titled, ‘blac(k)ademic,’ playing off of black and academic ... because I was seeing myself as a black intellectual or academic—that seems to be what I was pulling on. I would take [the academic jargon], not necessarily dumb it down, but translate it. ... A lot of the blogging was about my research or my encounters in academia, my negotiations with academia not only as a black woman but as a lesbian black woman.