Abstract
Blackgirls are an oft-disappeared population. Frequently, race or gender in popular and education discourse are foregrounded, leaving the Blackgirls fragmented. By contrast, one word, Blackgirl, rejects compartmentalizing Blackgirls’ lives, stories, and bodies and serves as a symbolic transgression to see them/us as complex and whole. Interlaced with the symbolic is the material needed to value the Black female body. To provide redress for the disregard of Blackgirl experience and posit the Black female body as a site of cultural memory and possibility, this article offers my body as a vessel through which transgression is incited. In particular, it discusses insights from an intergenerational project on Black girlhood and the vital impromptu transgressions/grooves I made during the reflexivity process of my performance. By sharing a Blackgirl’s truths and praxis that arose from yearnings, beauty, genius, and struggles of Black girlhood and being a Blackgirl advocate, this article expands the work of Black Girlhood Studies, interjects Blackgirls into the landscape of girlhood, and contributes to its reterritorialization.
Entering the Space Through What I “Learned to Forget”
Success, for me, was initially defined as academic achievement. Attaining As, making the honor roll, and later on being inducted into the National Honor’s Society were my foci. The costs on the pathway toward accruing success were neither fathomed nor considered. I applied for college preparatory programs, participated in summer school enrichment, and even pleaded with my mother to attend an all girls Catholic high school we could not afford. With each of these decisions, I held onto the espoused merit of academic prestige pawned off as the epitome of education and the key to success. I became a master at focusing only on the possible benefits of such deliberations. In retrospect, in pursuit of academic matriculation, I found forgetting to be quite effective and sometimes necessary.
In hindsight, forgetting afforded me the fortitude to stay the course. Being called a nigger in kindergarten, my fifth-grade teacher frequently referring to his students as stupid, having to miss lunch the first 2 weeks of ninth-grade year to “prove” what was already on my transcript—belonged in advanced foreign language and math classes, and contesting my high school guidance counselor’s insistence that I apply to less competitive colleges to name a few, were scarring moments. Each of these registered as isolated unfortunate moments on the path to academic success. Forgetting refers to the process of suppressing and undermining variables to the point that they become immaterial to the task, goal, and/or mission at hand. At the same time, to forget is ironically to render parts of oneself insignificant, yet they should inhibit to reach a goal. This act I speak of, though, was not solely intentional but learned. It became a technique for me in my fight to be someone of whom my family and I could be proud. Acknowledging and owning the outcome of forgetting are vital to imagining Black girlhood and seeing Blackgirls whole. Moreover, it resulted in masking, as much I could, those pieces of me unappreciated and/or aberrant and can be seen in the reflection below that recounts what came up and out when revisiting girlhood and previous notions of accomplishment.
I am a girl with dreams who always intuitively sensed that education would be her ticket—to explore the world, to live a life I created in my poetry, to ultimately help my family and make them proud. In the midst of this dreaming and pursuit of success, I made many concessions that (at the time) I presumed were simply part of the game. At the same time, my body participated in a sort of double speak. On the one hand, my grades and will got me into doors, my family could otherwise not afford. In these spaces, I served up good girl politics, got good grades, and soaked up all the information I could. Though, I didn’t see it then, my body just being present in those spaces, caused disruption. And when I asked questions (as I often did) and shared what I knew about the world and the topic at hand, cuz great grandma BJ told me not to take no wooden nickels, I was penalized. Looking back, these moments forced me to vie for approval, approval that I would likely never receive. Approval that “strongly encouraged” me to turn in my Blackgirl card for a so-called educated one. This (and more) is what I must remember. (Personal communication, February 2013)
Upon reflection of my desire for academic prestige and overall life success, the act of forgetting emerged as a necessary tactic. To reach scholastic opulence, a Black female must, even if temporarily, neglect and dismember parts and experiences that define her. She must deny elements of her identity and attend to the objective before her—success. But there are costs to forgetting. In my case, my forgetting accompanies temporary estrangement from my family, feelings of displacement, self denial, and need. Similarly, in formal educational spaces, this practice manifests in the sanctioning of dichotomous discourses and policies that split up Blackgirls into race or gendered individuals (see American Association of University Women Educational Foundation [AAUW], 1998, 2001).
To subvert and transgress this recurrence, I use Blackgirl as one word. Blackgirl one word rejects compartmentalization of Blackgirls’ lives, stories, and bodies and serves as a symbolic transgression to see them/us as complex and whole. Black feminist autoethnographer Robin Boylorn articulates,
It speaks to the twoness and oneness of my raced and gendered identity. I am never only Black or only girl/woman, but always both/and at the same time . . . I merge the words to make them touch on paper the way they touch in my everyday existence. (Personal communication, May 2014)
To make my Blackgirl and woman identities touch in my scholarship as they do within my body and lived experience, this article offers my body as a vessel through which transgression is incited. In particular, this piece (a) discusses insights from an intergenerational project on Black girlhood, (b) discloses memories from girlhood recalled during the process, and (c) elucidates tensions and possibilities of embracing the layered complexity of identity when researching Blackgirls. As a Blackgirl advocate, this article expands the work of Black Girlhood Studies and interjects Blackgirls into the landscape of girlhood and contributes to its reterritorialization by sharing Blackgirl truths and praxis that arise from yearnings, beauty, genius, and struggles of Black girlhood.
Method
This article extrapolates data from a larger intergenerational project interrogating the role of the body in shaping Black girlhood. For this project, I ventured into four community spaces, to which my scholarship and I am accountable—academe, my family, Blackgirls, and my body 1 to conduct four interactive arts-based workshops. 2 I began these workshops by offering a multi genre performance—music, dance, original poetry, and narrative—to share my particular experiences as a Blackgirl. The specific data discussed in this essay come from interview data and two workshops done with Blackgirls—one in Baltimore, Maryland, and the other in Buffalo, New York. Through reflection and revisiting of data, I create vignettes that reveal insights emerged from moments where transgression occurred, and the impulse to transgress as well as a lesson each groove uncovered about Black girlhood and/or the work of being a Blackgirl advocate. In this article, grooves in the praxis of Transgressngroove are moments in that breaking standard protocol is necessary. In these moments, it is more important to pause, reflect, and act based on the context than acquiescing to prescribed rules. They highlight moments of pause where, upon reflection, a transgressive move proved essential. Important to note is that grooves correspond with Black feminism’s deployment of embodied understanding as well as Black Girlhood Studies centering and homage to knowing and living from the body. To groove or allow grooves to guide one’s practice of being with Blackgirls and women in particular is to live in the present and foreground process over rules and unwavering instructions.
On Performing Black Feminism in Research
The “not-quiet” spaces of black femininity are unacknowledged spaces of sexual violence, violence, stereotype, and sociospatial marginalization; erased, erasable, hidden, resistant geographies and women that are, due to persistent and public forms of objectification, not readily decipherable. (McKittrick, 2006, p. 61)
19 years ago, I spent almost two months in juvie’.
19 years ago I left my home tired of pretending I was not hurt because my mom placed.
drinking and the search for love before me.
19 years ago I believed education was my way out/my door to freedom.
19 years ago I didn’t consider there was a difference between schooling and education.
19 years ago, I was underage, a runaway, angry, a tad unruly, with a desire to be seen.
19 years ago a PINS (Person in Need of Supervision) warrant was placed on my name.
19 years ago I wanted to be deemed important enough to be asked about my “go thru,” and how they [whoever asked] could help. I’m not certain this reality warranted the label, “person in need of supervision.” Perhaps in need of emotional attention would have been a more accurate description. My stank attitude and rogue behavior should have been, as it was, read as problematic but the source of my shift in demeanor was never explored. So, I took my stank ass attitude to juvie’. There, I unwillingly traded in my eighth grade honors classes, sports, afterschool enrichment, and a warm home with a physically present but emotionally unavailable mother for remedial coursework, blame, family shame, and sexual solicitations from staff. In juvie’ I silently accepted the lesson this moment was teaching me: my body has no value.
While in juvie’ I justified our treatment as what happens to “bad kids.” Never mind my straight As. Never mind I was in an enrichment program for promising inner city youth and, despite being labeled “at risk,” excelled in as a student leader and student. These factors had no merit there. My landing in juvie’ shifted my script. Black feminism, in contrast, like McKittrick’s statement, posits the Black female body as a site of injury and possibility. Black females and our bodies are bound to history. How we are read, evaluated, and utilized gets constituted through a historically configured Black female body (Collins, 2000; Roberts, 1997). Single Black female bodies and individuals are mediated and forced to contest, concede, and/or negotiate the historical. Black feminist bell hooks (1990) recognizes this battle and called for “radical black subjectivity,” to subvert monocausal approaches to issues and see social identities as intersecting and interlaced.
Similarly, Hip Hop feminist Ruth Nicole Brown’s (2009) Black Girlhood Studies, as an area of study, expands the narratives and bodies representative of Blackgirl identity and recognizes the fluidity of and between girlhood and womanhood (Sears, 2010; Walker, 1983). Moreover, “radical black subjectivity” in practice and the work of Black Girlhood Studies subvert the politics of respectability 3 (Higginbotham, 1993) as a measuring stick to assess appropriate conduct, especially for Black females. Important to note is that with the evolution of society, these politics have morphed but remain as marks for assessing whether Blackgirls are on the “right” path to achieving lady status or not. Blackgirls are therefore subjected to inspection and policing as a means of constricting their bodies, their being.
Performing Black feminism, I as a queer Blackgirlwoman 4 have assumed responsibility for transgression, a transgression that begins with entering. How do I enter this work in a way that is not prescriptive but organic and that above all, makes empathy possible? Here, I introduce the groove as a tool for traversing difficult terrain and enacting transgression. Transgression is an intentional way of engaging Blackgirls in particular and the world in general. In the case of Blackgirl advocacy, transgression denotes a break from convention and recognition of the need for such a disruption. It is thus a rejection of hierarchy between girl and woman and an embracing of their interlaced reality instead. From this perspective, transgression comes out of my work with Blackgirls and women. In recognition of the ways in which representations of Blackgirls and women are flattened and static, transgression is located within a larger living praxis named Transgressngroove.
As an intervention that challenges the Cartesian mind/body duality and places the body at the fore of lived experience (Hill, 2014), Transgressngroove follows the work of Black Girlhood Studies scholar Ruth Nicole Brown (2009, 2013) and aims to celebrate the vastness and fluidity of Black femininity and specifically Black girlhood. With a focus on embodiment, transgressngroove destabilizes and chips away at those between and across the categories and social locations of girl/woman, artist/scholar, and researcher/researched. Transgression, then, is a necessary practice and way of being and working with Blackgirls. In the following sections, I elucidate transgression. Specifically, I present grooves that reflect upon moments during the research process where transgression was required to precede in a way that did not reify power nor conventions of research and youth/adult relationships. Each of these grooves in the following sections uncovers ways to practice transgression when working and enacting research with Blackgirls.
Grooves Not Prescriptions: Enacting Transgression to See Black Girlhood Anew
Groove 1: Put Yourself on the Line
This is and isn’t school. Yes, I am standing outside a classroom door on a college campus, preparing to facilitate this workshop, collect this data, make space for Blackgirls to be but I’m not here to teach. This is an experience. This is their time. And if anyone is skoolin anybody, it’ll be them skoolin me. I have to make that clear. This has to be different, better than school. This workshop has to show not tell them this time is their time. to share. to do. Say no. to feel. to speak. Refuse to do. move, without abandon. I cannot simply tell them this. I need it to be real. I need them to know I’m serious. There has to be a better way. Open the door I want them to move through. Create a space that models a different way for education to occur. For these girls to see me as more—more than a teacher, a Black woman, someone of authority. to see our stories, black femaleness, our bodies, constructions of blackness, us in relationship. I accept this responsibility. I mean I’m here. Now what?! Invite them into my body, that’s what.
Blackgirls have enough folk telling them what to do, how to do it, what they could do better, how not to speak, how not to dress, how not to fight, and how not to be who they/we are. Lightfoot (1976), Brown (2009, 2013), Ladner (1971), M. W. Morris (2016), E. W. Morris (2007), Lei (2003), Fordham (1993), Evans-Winters (2005), the African American Policy Forum (2015), and Grant (1994) take various angles and in different ways archive and/or talk back to the disheartening reality that Blackgirls’ bodies do not operate as their own and are tattooed by historical tropes and cultural expectations. As a healing project, I was not invested in re-inscribing such hauntings onto any of our bodies. But avoiding such enmity is easier in theory than practice.
As a Blackgirlwoman, I am cognizant of the many times and tools employed to domesticate my body and person as a young and more grown more seasoned girl. Again, I hear the warning often stressed in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), “Your task is to relate to Blackgirls” on repeat, and decide that to minimize this possibility of policing and reification of power, I needed to strip down, undress before them (SOLHOT is a creative and Blackgirl celebration space. Dedicated to unlearning, disruption, and freedom SOLHOT functions under the guise of an after school program but serves as an intergenerational experience of deploying art to capture and retell Blackgirl knowing, imagining, and being in the world.). Transgression in this moment meant exercising strength and embodied vulnerability (Hill, in press). Black feminist Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2009) asserts, “Such is the dilemma of strength—to choose appearances and remain unknown to other people, or to choose truth and risks being disregarded by them” (p. 5). I sensed that a performance to open the workshop would serve us all better.
Rather than maintaining a guard between the girls and me and entering the workshop space from a place of distant authority, as many Black women and adults did with me, I decided to disclose experiences in my life that made me less perfect, less confident, and more similar to them. Disclosure, here, functioned as transgression. By beginning the workshop with disclosure and revealing parts of me that display imperfections and wounds, I obliterated the potential misconception of having it all together without flaw. I did not require nor suggest the girls divulge information about themselves. It was only important here that I availed myself as blemished to work in progress. Deferring to my Black feminist and critical pedagogy training, while remembering my experiences with enrichment and mentoring programs where learning was constructed as unidirectional, I decided to cross the manufactured boundaries between girl/woman, youth/adult, and learner/teacher. As a result, I began my performance with memories of my younger days of girlhood; “Took em’ back to shame of not big enough (to be Black) ass, gapped teeth, feeling insignificant, and not beautiful. Take em’ back. Undress.”
Through my performance, girls nodded their heads, leaned in, and watched intensely. Following the performance girls responded (self-chosen pseudonyms):
I could feel your pain of people stereotyping you and assuming you less Black because of how much butt you didn’t have.
Yea. It was like, when you were talking you were telling my story.
You almost made me cry. That was beautiful.
Each girl connected to and began to share similar experiences and the pain these memories engendered. It was in our collective disclosure of pains, silences, and yearnings that they/we were heard in ways we had not been before. This moment already came with a lesson that pumped like Blackgirl bass in my head: “If you want Blackgirls to open up you betta do so first. They deserve and want to know why we are in their space asking them things. They need to know we are asking the same things of ourselves.”
The choice to disclose was intentional. I did not surmise it would create such a ripple effect of sharing. What I knew was that if there was any chance for the girls to see beyond my adult status, in some cases their former summer enrichment teacher, and another Black woman seeking to fix and/or get them in order, I wanted to be different. As a result of my willingness to expose the underbelly of who was standing before them and the wounds I carry with me, the girls felt comfortable to do the same. This groove therefore illustrates disclosure as a form of transgression. Likewise, it displays its effectiveness in generating enough comfort for the girls to share their narratives within the space—even when only one girl was present, which will be discussed in the next groove.
Groove 2: “One is the Magic Number”
I drove almost 7 hr across multiple highways to Buffalo, New York, where I was to facilitate a workshop for 15 to 20 girls who signed up to be part of my project. An enthusiastic parent with a Spanish accent expressed how she’s heard so much about me and was looking forward to her daughter Pasta (pseudonym) participating in the workshop. Forty-five minutes passed and Pasta, her mother, Mrs. Seys (pseudonym), and I were the only ones present. Hands clammy, slightly tired, anxious to know Pasta’s story, I texted my adviser with a concern:
So I’m in Buffalo and 20 girls were signed up but only two have shown up.
Just sharing.
Make it count for those two and you! It’s going to be life changing!!!
Correction 1 and her mother, the other is here for tutoring.
1 is the magic number!
Yesssss it is. Jill said it. After this I’ll ask you what’s the set # of girls I need to have, to stop collecting as I get confused when it’s autoethnography and quantity/qualitative debate.
☺
(Personal communication, September 2012)
Panic. Absolute panic. Pasta being there was important. In that moment, it was all that mattered. Yet, the researcher part of me fixated on the numbers. One. Although a qualitative researcher focuses on experience and meaning making, I knew from readings I surveyed, those cited time-and-time again as canon references, but paid no homage to one person’s story.
On one hand, I was thrilled when only Pasta showed up because I presumed it would allow us to talk and share more. On the other hand, I worried how only one girl showing up would direct the course of my research. More so, I felt internal discomfort. Then, I could not fully articulate the gravity of either the moment or its affect. Upon reflection, my choice to continue in the work as if all the girls were present proved a necessary transgression filled with contention. Pasta mattered. Yet in social research, emphasis is placed on numbers and at the very least groups. Her voice alone was invaluable. But how do I write this up? What meaning do I insist that researchers see in our time together? Why am I trippin? Because I am already being held to the fire for conducting experimental research, because I feel unprepared to make such a grave decision, and because research is what engendered this moment and what is making me question it.
In theory, I say all Blackgirls matter and that each voice is significant and yet I was toiling. Do I lead from my conviction or focus on numbers? Let my actions align with my belief that one Blackgirl and her voice deserves space or reschedule and be a walking contradiction? An internal battle ensued. A deliberation took place. The Blackgirl advocate defeated the researcher. Transgression manifested here in foregrounding of the importance of voice and the lack of space made for Blackgirls’ voices to be heard, even only one Blackgirl’s voice. More specifically, foregrounding my Blackgirlwoman and Blackgirl advocate identities shifted the research. My concern resided in making space for Pasta’s voice and truths to be heard. Whether or not I could justify a one-girl workshop was immaterial. Blackgirl research is Blackgirl advocacy simultaneously—this knowing was of necessity. To work from this knowing meant that I chose to subvert my concerns as a doctoral researcher (i.e., Is it a workshop when there is only one girl present? How will I write up this set of data? How do I place this workshop in conversation with the other workshop? How much does the trip cost?) and focused my attention on the larger picture of my research—making space for Blackgirls and women to collectively generate knowledge from girlhood and work through challenges of and celebrate Black femininity in all of its vastness.
Groove 3: Blackgirls Be Too Much
What immediately comes to mind when you think about and hear the word “Blackgirl?” This was the question I posed to open the floor for the girls in the two workshops to express their truths about who they are. They all self-identified as Blackgirls, which is why they were part of the project. Yet they chose stereotypical words and descriptors that distanced themselves from the category, Blackgirls. When I asked Christa, Pasta, Phillipi, Deborah, Unique, and Nicole, what immediately came to mind about Blackgirls, they blurted out and wrote, “Ratchetness, attitude, loud, angry, attention seekers, geto, scary” to name a few.
If these words described Blackgirls, and they also self-identified as Blackgirls, what kind were they? I want to ask, “Ain’t you a Blackgirl?!” I get it. Unique and Christa are likely tired of seeing the limited depictions of Blackgirls. More so, they are tired of not seeing themselves represented in these depictions. Yet I am very uncomfortable with these dichotomous and implicit judgments taking place. This is not what I learned in SOLHOT. This is not the way to celebrate Blackgirls. But the aim of this research is to have Blackgirls’ voices heard. To amplify those voices that align with a particular vantage point and silence the others would be to align with normative standards. All Blackgirl voices will not sound identical. And perhaps until Blackness is given its own freedom, this good/bad dichotomy is what can be expected.
To undermine my own urge to critique the normative perspectives and reduce their assessments to internalized oppression, I needed to lean into this groove. Transgression here necessitated deeper listening. I returned to my girlhood experiences of being told and coming to believe that to be educated is to rid of oneself. From this (re)membering (Dillard, 2012) arose the need to beholden to Black Girlhood Studies and acknowledge complexity and even contradiction (Brown, 2009). As a result, I opted to hold in tandem my thoughts, “Ain’t you a Blackgirl?” and chose to figure out how to translate it into something useful when they are done saying what they gotta say. What does their hunger for formal education have to do with this framing of Blackgirls, I wonder?
10 years ago I moved to Ohio
10 years ago I entered graduate school
10 years ago I was angry, pissed even that grad school was yet another place people were not being held accountable for their shit
10 years ago I still believed education was the key to success
10 years ago I was studying student development
10 years ago I sensed education was more, more than what the books were saying, more than what the books they told me to read were
10 years ago, to my family, I was a success, for the most part
10 years ago I thought the mentor and enrichment programs, advice on how to be a lady, and etiquette classes were important and if there were, more girls like me, where I’m from would get a chance
10 years ago I had politics of respectability down pat and played the shit out it, while behind closed doors . . .
10 years ago I was morphing
10 years ago I was a year into growing my locs
10 years ago I turned in my lesbian card for a queer one
10 years ago I could only remember the hurts and silences, and abuse of my girlhood
10 years ago I was focused on getting into a PhD program, lining up my masters degree and every move I made, except the ones behind closed doors of course, be a step toward “the ultimate”
10 years ago unknowingly, a riot inside me began
Pasta’s story
“I feel very uncomfortable in school in a way, because of my skin and how people are like, ‘oh look at chu hanging out with all those Black people’ and I be like,‘okay.’ I don’t know, sometimes I feel very uncomfortable when I’m around people who are loud and obnoxious and I wonder, ‘Am I really that person’s friend? Or am I that person behind a shadow?’”
Pasta’s words point to the complexity of perception, skin complexion, and culture in shaping how Blackgirls traverse through the world and, in this particular instance, school. Upon meeting Pasta and her mother at the Gateway Family Resource Center in Buffalo, New York, it was evident by her mother’s Spanish accent (Pasta did not speak in the beginning), her hair texture, and name that she was Latina. I was not sure from what country but later learned that her family was from the Dominican Republic. Pasta’s ethnicity, hue, and hair texture made her different but still Black. From Pasta’s recollection of the above moment of being judged for interacting with other readily identifiable Black youth, it is clear that the youth mentioned by Pasta identify culturally closer to Pasta. Implicit in her exploration of reasons for discomfort around “loud and obnoxious” people were questions as to whether her dis-ease came from the lack of actual friendship they had, or because she was actually a masked version of them. In other words, Pasta was quarreling about her identity. She pondered her nature of discomfort with and questioned if her response was connected to a concealed desire to be loud.
Educational research shows that being loud is not deemed an appropriate characteristic of femininity. Fordham (1993) finds that assumed gender roles and conceptions of femininity affected the perception of Blackgirls, which overlapped into their academic experience. Blackgirls who faired best in school—good grades, test scores, and support from teachers—often took a more silent approach to their education. In contrast, those “loud Blackgirls” tended to have good grades but lower test scores and teacher support. Those girls who resisted behaviors deemed acceptable by teachers and other staff were marked not only as different but inferior as well, indicated in the phrase “those loud Blackgirls.”
Certainly, Pasta shared discomfort and shame when it came to Blackness and being around loud people. The uneasiness she experienced can also be attributed to the betwixt and between place she occupies as a Latina. The discourse of race in the United States often conflates race and ethnicity, forcing Latinas and Latinos to be beholden to their ethnicity. Accordingly, Pasta’s Dominican ethnicity, accent, complexion, and hair texture distance her from the category Black in some spaces. Yet, her skin color might constitute her as morenita (a Brown girl in Spanish), which in Dominican culture can be interchangeable with being Black. Most importantly, the coming together of her features and ethnicity makes for a complicated lived experience, one that justifies her contentious affiliation with Blackness.
Unique’s story
“Not all of us are idiots and start twerkin’ in the middle of the hallway for no good reason! I actually read books!” This candid grievance made by Unique, a 16-year-old raised in a Cameroonian American household, and supported by Christa, Deborah, and Nicole with head nods and uh huhs during our workshop, signals implicit embarrassment, shame, and an intentional break between her Blackgirl self and a Blackgirl collective. From the standpoint of those writing about Blackgirls, Unique’s belief that there was “no good reason” to be twerkin’ in the school hallways could be plausible, especially when operating from a framework of respectability. However, in looking at the layers of culture, identity, and socialization, Unique’s words unearth a search for visibility. Yet, while carving out her Blackgirl identity, which challenged the popular belief that Black youth generally dislike school, Unique failed to see the myriad of reasons for hallway twerking.
“Twerkin’ in the hallway” could have been a means of reorienting themselves with their bodies (Brown, 2009) or simply because it felt “good” (Lindsey, 2013), which is important and reason enough. Also, whether or not the girl Unique referenced intentionally made the hallway a political space, her decision to dance, to twerk, to break her back in school was an act of defiance in a highly policed and disciplined space. The act of twerkin’ in the middle of the [school] hallway, then, can be seen as an act of resistance where foregrounding the Blackgirl body transforms the school hallway into a place of comfort and/or where Blackgirls claim authority.
Unique’s disdain and disassociation with the twerkin’ Blackgirl is reasonable and (can be) justified as a logical response to limited and dichotomous constructions of Black femininity. Too many limitations are placed on who Blackgirls can be: The Blackgirl who twerks cannot also be the Blackgirl who is an A student, the Blackgirl who loves reading cannot be sexually active, and the Blackgirl who fights is not a good girl. The politics of respectability and politics of femininity are mapped onto the Blackgirl’s body. Haunted by these myths about Black women and femininity that constrict, debase, and cramp Blackgirls and women into confined space, it makes sense for Unique, a young Blackgirl who desires to be seen as studious, smart, an avid reader, and to reject and minimize other Blackgirls and their behaviors that she considers as getting in the way of her Blackgirl identity. Unique’s outward disapproval of Blackgirls who behave differently than she is simultaneously evidence of possible shame and a strategic move.
To create individual identities that speak to who they are, want to be, and how they see themselves, Blackgirls choreograph individual and collective identity. Due to the construction of Blackness and femininity as antithesis, Blackgirls are burdened with historical stereotypes of Black femininity and monolithic portrayals of Blackgirl’s ways of being. They/we weave in and out of the homogeneous category Blackgirl to devise choreography that aligns with desirable constructions of self. Within the willingness of these girls, Pasta and Unique in particular, to lay claim to the label Blackgirl while critiquing and subverting popularized frames of this subject, is a key point being made accompanied by a lesson: Being a Blackgirl is an individual and collective experience simultaneously. Point made. If you, as Blackgirl advocate, are really about this work, you must break some of your rules and develop new choreography. This last transgression in the act of groove opens up a space to develop a new choreography by contradicting, challenging, and diverting the fixed meanings of Blackgirl’s identity. In the final section, I will share what I learned from these grooves as well as from being in the presence of Blackgirls.
What (These) Blackgirls Taught Me
Through sharing time, space, and experience, I learned the value of transgression. Illuminated in the preceding grooves is the power of transgression as tool for uniting and blurring lines that create pathways for potential intimacy and connection. Related, these grooves as well as the overall workshops reveal the intricate relationship between transgression and embodied vulnerability (see Hill, in press). Enacted collectively here, transgression bridged their Blackgirls’ realities and my memories of being a Blackgirl. Moreover, it served as a mirror into Black girlhood. My intuition and commitment to allowing these girls to guide the way in our work of reflecting upon the Black female body generally and how our bodies informed our educational experiences particularly led to my deliberation to transgress adult/child, teacher/student, and woman/girl boundaries.
Equally, our collective sharing highlights an evident dialectical and contentious relationship between being Black, female, and invested in formal educational matriculation. Similar to my experiences described above, Pasta and Unique render visible the uphill battle they endure as Blackgirls who enjoy receiving a formal education. Their experiences illuminate the struggles and mountains Blackgirls must surmount to excel in formal education spaces. Just because Blackgirls are graduating high school at a decent rate does not mean education has done right by them or that they are “faring well.” There must be a deeper investigation into what constitutes “faring well.”
We, Blackgirl advocates and researchers, must interrogate what happens to Blackgirls’ bodies through the formal education process. Those of us invested in Blackgirls’ livelihood must ask what they are experiencing and create space for them to tell us what they know about their lives as well as what they need from us as educators, elders, activists, and advocates. We must recognize that death and violence come in many forms, and therefore may be overlooking and/or simply neglecting these realities when they come to Blackgirl livelihood. The labor of Black Girlhood Studies and Blackgirl advocates is to engender work with Blackgirls, which claim, embody, and contribute to the infinite and even conflicting representations of Blackgirls. This work should be creative and informed by tools and assets presented by the particular girls present.
The necessary transgression, then, to work lovingly and efficaciously with Blackgirls and on Blackgirls’ behalf is to practice embodied vulnerability (Hill, 2016). To denounce the manufactured demarcation between girlhood and womanhood, is to reimagine relationships between girls and women, and to embrace and work from the body. In my case, to (re)member 5 being a Blackgirl, to recall those desires, experiences, and ways of moving in the world that got lost in translation on the journey toward higher education, is to bring me closer to Blackgirls. Moreover, to go beyond (re)memory to return in an embodied sense to that space is to both (re)member and celebrate Black girlhood as a space of knowing. To, as a woman, (re)member one’s Blackgirlness then, is to recover those things displaced in the process of becoming adult, becoming woman. Furthermore, this process engenders a new orientation to Blackgirls and self. In particular, it demands new constructions of the relationship between girlhood and womanhood as well as across the spectrum of Black female bodies. To be a Blackgirl advocate in this body is to be a Blackgirl and Black woman at the same time (Taaffe, 2012) and to refuse to separate these selves. To see and present myself as in process, ellipses not a period.
Where I am/am going is to continue seeing, being seen, hearing, being heard, celebrating, being celebrated, and affirming Blackgirls. I end here with an original poem, “Blackgirl theory,” written as synthesis of what was realized, cemented, and echoed about Blackgirls and Black girlhood during this exploration. This poem embodies what Blackgirls witness and endure, what we know, and therefore what I aim to continue dispelling and unveiling.
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Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.