Becoming Human: The Beauty of Breaking Open a Radical Softness audioscapes en Pink
- Shapel LaBorde
- Apr 3
- 2 min read
I had to create this vulnerability and risk collage for a class I am taking called, "curriculum of violence: “difficult knowledge”and the politics of pedagogy"
This collage is my attempt to hold the fragile, holy tension between vulnerability and risk—between being undone and becoming more deeply human. Inspired by Butler’s insistence that ethics emerge in our moments of unknowingness, I layered my story as a Black single mother, scholar, daughter of incarceration and disability, and the first LaBorde to pursue a PhD, into a visual constellation of transformation.
The image of a crystal vulnerability is not rupture for its own sake,it is a sacred opening. The butterfly, subway map, and silhouette of a mother and child symbolize movement through uncertainty, the dailiness of navigating systems not built for our thriving. Precarity is not abstract for me, it is embodied. It is in waking at 5 AM to care for my daughter and students while writing through grief, memory, and love.
My scholarship, deeply rooted in Black feminist epistemology, insists that knowing cannot be divorced from feeling, risk, embodiment, or relationship. The presence of Grandma Babe anchors the collage, she reminds me that care work is intellectual work, that survival is spiritual.
I am drawn to Butler’s framing of ethics as “a willingness to become undone in relation to others.” That is how I understand love, motherhood, and Black womanhood. Risking myself is not a choice—it is an inheritance, a methodology, a prayer. This collage is a portal through which I invite myself to stop performing certainty and allow myself to feel my way toward liberation.I am still tired yall.
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