‘It’s High School. Everybody Gone Judge Yuh’: school as a social world where Afro-Caribbean girlhood experiences are created

Abstract

ABSTRACT School operates as a space/place where girls must navigate and negotiate different aspects of their identities further adding to the complexities of Black girlhood. The scantiness of sociological scholarship surrounding Black girls from the Dutch West Indies elucidates this article’s importance. I conducted audio- and video-recorded interviews with nine Afro-Caribbean girls ages 14–17 years old. The interviews were interpreted using an Afro-Caribbean transnational feminist framework which specifically centres the lives of the girls. Findings reveal that Afro-Caribbean girls navigate school by negotiating their decisions about their hair, appearance, and dress to resist heteronormative ideas in Sint Maarten. This paper is a part of a larger project where I examined how Afro-Caribbean girls from the island of Sint Maarten conceptualise what it means to be a girl and to understand how they narrate, navigate, and negotiate their girlhood experiences.