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Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming alongside Massumi’s reading of A Thousand Plateaus (1992), I explore how Black girls become educated in the molar assemblage1 of schools: students, teachers, classrooms, bodies raced and gendered by the practices of White schooling. Through readings of narratives of Black girls, I examine how fixed notions of Blackness and girlhood are disrupted by girls becoming-molecular.2 Finally, I consider how Black girls are affected by White schooling spaces and how Black girls’ bodies shift and change schooling spaces by existing in them.

Inspired by Toni Morrison’s Sula (2004), this paper thinks through the use (broadly imagined) of literary texts that are experimentally read beside and through theoretical texts in order to prompt unexpected thinking. This approach places literature beside traditional research texts, rather than subordinate to such texts. The thinking and doing that occurs in relation to the tangle of texts, literary and otherwise, is already happening, even though often unrecognized. Differently attending to the jumble created by the multitude of texts that make up our reading lives might snag us in ways that open paths to new ways of thinking, resulting in novel approaches, or tangles of approaches, to post qualitative research. While literary texts are what is of interest here, the argument might extend to film, art, and other cultural texts not usually imagined as directly related to post qualitative inquiry.

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