What happened when I invited students to see me? A Black queer professor's reflections on practicing embodied vulnerability in the classroom.

What are the hesitations, dangers, and potentialities to inviting students to peruse my body? What possibilities arise from centering and leading with the body in the teaching/learning process? What risks and possibilities does this enactment pose to a Black lesbian educator? This auto/ethnography journeys through and reflects upon my experience enacting what I have coined "embodied vulnerability" as a pedagogical practice. Within this essay, I explore the interrelationship of race, gender, and embodiment (or, the performance of self). In addition, I reflect upon the pedagogical exercise-enacted over the last seven years-of asking students to see me and name what they see to illumine how social identities are read alongside context/location, as well as in relation to other assumed identities.