Black Girlhood Research Articles

Time and Flesh: Exploring the Embodied Experiences of Black Mothers.

Drawing on Black feminist theories of intersectionality and concepts of temporality and embodiment, this study centers Black girlhood to understand Black girls embodied journeys of "becoming" Black women. Findings revealed that: (a) Black girls often have complicated histories that lead to constrained and liberatory choices in adulthood and motherhood; (b) becoming a Black woman involves continual adaptations to temporal and historical contexts; and (c) Black motherhood is a contested space, deeply shaped by remembering Black girlhood and navigating maternal responses to legacies of harm. This study highlights the challenges and strengths in the transitory states of Black womanhood.

Being Womanish: A Womanist Perspective on Black Girlhood

ABSTRACT This article asserts the value of Black girls’ lived experiences as a source for theological reflection in Womanist pastoral theology. In doing so, it proposes a methodological shift in Womanist pastoral theology and introduces a method called the Kaleidoscopic Analysis Perspective or KAP—a methodology designed with and for Black girls toward a Womanish vision of pastoral theology and care.

On “Othering” Cuties: The Politicization of Contemporary Black Girlhood in The Digital Era

On “Othering” <i>Cuties</i>: The Politicization of Contemporary Black Girlhood in The Digital Era

Black girlhood media studies: bridging multidisciplinary approaches from old to new media

ABSTRACT Black girlhood media studies provides a space to connect multidisciplinary research across the fields of African American and African Diaspora studies, media studies, gender studies, and communications. With a focus on film, television, and digital media, this essay highlights common themes and approaches of existing scholarship on Black girlhood in media to further understand and contemplate Black girlhood as a media genre. Key themes in prior literature include: adultification and lack of innocence, stereotypes, racial politics, digital media artifacts, and audience perceptions. The essay concludes with suggestions for ways scholars, producers, and consumers can further engage collective cultural representations and varied contexts to build a robust field of Black girlhood media studies.

Situative Black Girlhood Reading Motivations: Why and How Black Girls Read and Comprehend Text

This study aims to illustrate the complex relationships between reading motivation and reading comprehension for Black girl readers. There is an urgent need for research that explicitly centers on the reading motivations of Black girls through a humanizing, asset-oriented lens. Through a Situative Black Girlhood Reading Motivations lens, which integrates a situative perspective on motivation and the tenets of Black Girlhood Studies, this multi-year study focuses on a group of Black girl readers participating in a summer reading program. Qualitative data, including video observations, student work artifacts, and small-group artifact-elicited interviews, were analyzed through a generic inductive approach to answer the research question, “How are relationships between Black girls’ reading motivations and their reading comprehension evident in their reading engagement and enactments?” The findings demonstrate that the participants’ most salient reading motivations in this instructional context (meaning-oriented, collaborative, and liberatory reading motivations) (1) were a precursor to their comprehension, (2) worked in tandem with their comprehension, and (3) stemmed from their comprehension. These findings contribute to models of reading by illustrating the need for additional complexity when describing the relationship between reading motivation and comprehension.

Brown Skin Girl: Mapping Negotiations of Colorism, Digital Resistance, and Black Girlhood

This study delves into the intricate relationship between the symbolic representation of skin color in virtual avatars and its profound impact on people's self-value within American society. Over time, white skin has been bestowed with societal significance, often associated with power and privilege. This research addresses the profound implications of these avatar choices on individuals' self-identity and the reinforcement of prevailing cultural norms. It highlights the subtle yet impactful ways in which modern technology intertwines with and reinforces societal attitudes toward race and appearance. By shedding light on this phenomenon, this paper aims to encourage further discussions on the potential consequences of associating skin color with value and self-worth in virtual spaces.

“Real queens fix each other’s crowns”: The interiorities of Black (British) girlhood in Rocks (2019)

ABSTRACT This article explores and analyses the production and representation of Black (British) girlhoods in Sarah Gavron’s film Rocks (2019), and the effects this has had on Black women and girl actors, film-makers, and audiences. Adopting a critical Black (British) girlhood framework that is rooted in Black feminist theory, it explores how Black girls’ interior worldbuilding in British screen media and beyond can be a source of empowerment and affective memory work for these groups. Centring the voices of Black girls and women, this article locates the interiorities of Black (British) girlhood within practices of resistance and self-definition, the formation and maintenance of girls’ intimate friendships, and their intergenerational solidarities. Methodologically, it analyses the film’s narrative alongside interviews from the actors and creatives, Black women’s written memories of their girlhoods, and essays from young Black girls living in Britain to reveal how Black (British) girlhood is relational, embodied, and emotionally affective.

The Global History of Black Girlhood ed. by Corinne T. Field and LaKisha Michelle Simmons (review)

The Global History of Black Girlhood ed. by Corinne T. Field and LaKisha Michelle Simmons (review)

The Intellectual World of Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Genius

Abstract: This article examines the life and work of Phillis Wheatley and her interlocutors to consider how African-descended people conceptualized liberty and formed an intellectual community during the American Revolution. Her poetry and epistolary exchanges, shared with a range of acquaintances in the Atlantic World, reveal an intellectual universe that she created for herself and one that drew her into the political spotlight. Leaders of the founding generation began to question the intellectual possibilities for an African girl in ways that held political implications for the future of slavery. I argue that Wheatley's life and work opens critical avenues for exploring intellectualism as an aspiration of Black life in early America, and that her world of ideas sheds light on the possibilities of Black girlhood in the late eighteenth century.

Portraits of Resistance: Exploring Intra-personal, Social, and Institutional Resistances through the Use of Arts-Based Research among Racialized Parents of Autistic Children and Youth

The lives of children who live at the intersectional nexus between childhood autism and race may be considered as “shadow stories” that have remained silenced in autism literature. We explored the experiences of racialized parents who provide care to autistic children. We drew on a theoretical framework known as DisCrit and decolonizing arts-based methodologies. Racialized parents of autistic children demonstrated resistance along various themes, including fighting the system, protecting my child, and creating cultural communities. We join black girlhood studies, critical race theory, and disabled children’s childhood studies by continuing the journey of decentering Whiteness in childhood disability research. We demonstrate how disabled racialized communities engage in activism and social justice while forming powerful counter-discourses.

Unaccompanied migrant girls: navigating religious girlhood in the UK

ABSTRACT This paper focusses on unaccompanied migrant young women from Sub-Saharan Africa and the social workers who encounter them in the UK. Taking an intersectional approach, and drawing on notions of black girlhood, it explores how unaccompanied girls may attempt to re-centre their religious identities within diversely religious-spiritual-secular spaces. Drawing on data from research carried out by the first author, the article considers how girls continually adapt their religious practices in new gendered/racialised spaces, and explores the meanings attached to religious practice by social workers and by girls themselves. The paper argues social workers may benefit from resources to develop their religious literacy, and that organisations may benefit from drawing on post-colonial frameworks to critically examine social work responses to black, unaccompanied girls.

Streaming Black girlhood: biculturality, nostalgia and hypervisibility in Cuties

ABSTRACT The era of streaming services and online distribution of independent films have offered more varied representations of the African Diaspora than were previously available through traditional media. Within this context, Maïmouna Doucouré’s acclaimed 2020 film, Cuties, presents a poignant and nuanced, yet controversial representation of Black immigrant biculturality, girlhood, and puberty. In this essay, we engage with Cuties through the lens of nostalgia as an escape from uncomfortable realities. Set in France, the film centres the immigrant experience. The protagonist Aminata (Amy), a French-Senegalese preteen, witnesses her mother’s sadness at her husband’s impending wedding. Amy embarks on a journey of body agency and rage that demonstrates her navigation between cultures. We critically engage with how Amy disrupts her mother’s and community’s immigrant nostalgia: a longing and idealizing for the culture of their homeland in opposition to the dominant culture of their adopted country. We also examine how the U.S. release of Cuties on Netflix got caught, perhaps unintentionally, in the crosshairs of a U.S. culture war. The marketing for Cuties presented a sexualized, feel-good depiction of the girls in the film which distracted from Doucouré’s true aim of depicting the rage of girlhood and the negative influences of sexualized popular culture, hypervisibility, and imagery on adolescent girls. We consider this backlash from the perspective of nostalgia as well: We unpack how this controversy reflects some Black viewers’ desire for a ‘return’ to polite and tame filmic representations of Black girls. Despite Doucouré’s efforts to explain herself and sympathetic critics’ campaign to defend the film, there was some preoccupation with the young girls’ display of sexuality. We perceive Doucouré as challenging audiences to stay present in the challenges facing young Black girls, particularly as they are increasingly exposed to online models of sexuality and femininity.

A Black Womanist Theomethaxis

This article offers a new tool for women of color scholars to write and analyze the data and archive from their own life journals and journeys. Coining a new concept of theomethaxis, a Black Womanist Theomethaxis framework is an integration of theory, methodology, and praxis focused on the intersection of race, gender, and spirituality. It uses Black women’s autobiography, critical praxis autoethnography, counter-storytelling, and Black girl cartography as methodological tools. Drawing from cultural studies, feminist theories, African American history, women’s history, and childhood studies, it integrates theoretical constructs from Black feminist thought, Black girlhood studies, Critical Black Feminism, Hip-Hop Feminism, Crunk Feminism, New Black Feminism, Womanist thought, Womanist theology, and the Wild Woman Archetype. Integrating personal narrative, the article illustrates how the framework facilitated the praxis of analyzing 45 years of journals, revealing revolutionary and transformational themes in the initiation journey from Black girlhood to Black womanhood. The concept of a womanist theomethaxis may also provide a framework for application to other academic areas and studies, such as Chicana/Latina feminist studies, Asian American feminist studies, and Indigenous feminist studies.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invisibilized Challenges of Black Girlhood in Elite Independent Schools

Background/Context: The experiences of Black girls navigating elite, predominantly white independent schools remain underresearched in the academy despite this issue being integral in disciplines such as sociology, education, and African American studies. Within such institutions, Black girls must navigate the duality of their privilege in having access to the highest quality and resourced education with the marginality of being a demographic minority within a space controlled by cultural elites. Purpose: This study investigates the experiences of Black girls in independent schools via the accounts of Black-woman-identifying alumni of such institutions. This study utilizes a Black feminist framework for understanding the often overlooked excess challenges that Black girls are forced to face. Research Design: Through qualitative semi-structured, conversational interviews with 13 Black women graduates of 10 Mid-Atlantic and New England boarding and day schools, this study explores how the graduates reflect on their experiences navigating elite schooling during formative adolescent years, decision-making processes, and management of Black girl identities within the exceedingly white and wealthy context of independent schools. Conclusions: Significant themes that emerged from the qualitative data generated by this study include feelings of rootlessness from Black and white communities, difficulty navigating a racialized and gendered social hierarchy, and heightened levels of social anxiety and self-consciousness about physical and ideological selves. Through a thematic retelling from those who have lived through the challenges and understand how they are presented in these contexts, the significance of this study’s exploration of Black girls in independent school is the (1) liberation of these historically marginalized voices and (2) potential to provide current school leaders a framework for how best to support their students.

A Black feminist youth participatory action research photovoice exploration of Black girls and college women.

Utilizing a Black and Hip Hop feminist and Black girlhood studies theoretical lens, the purpose of this study is to explore how Black girls (14-17) and women (19-22), who are in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) mentoring program, BlackGirlsResearch (pseudonym) express their gendered racial identities and gendered racial experiences through their participation in a YPAR photovoice program. This study seeks to answer the following research question: (1) How do Black girls and college women conceptualize their gendered racial identities and gendered racial lived experiences in predominately white schools using a YPAR methodology and photovoice? Employing a qualitative thematic analysis to explore 36 photovoice narratives, results yielded 3 themes: (1) experiencing challenges at predominately white institutions (PWIs): false inclusivity, continued underrepresentation, and tokenism (2) identifying as "queens of culture": identity and empowerment through art, culture, and breaking conformity and (3) activism, inclusion, and accountability: solutions for PWIs. The results of this study indicate that Black girls and women can not only identify and critically discuss issues related to Black girls and women within PWIs, but through YPAR, they can push for positive youth development and community solutions related to those issues.

Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online

Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online

Black Girlhood Persists: Pecola’s Persistence as Non/Child in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye 1

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgmentsI would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Miranda Green-Barteet and Dr. Amanda Allen for their insightful feedback and vision as the editors of this important special issue and acknowledge the hard work of my research assistant, Emily Driscoll. I would also like to thank my doctoral supervisor, Dr. Thy Phu, for her guidance, and my husband, Brian, for his unwavering support. Finally, I would like to dedicate this article to my daughter—you are so loved.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and Western University's President's Entrance Scholarship and Doctoral Excellence Research Award.

Black on Black on Black on Black: An interview with Artist-Scholar Dr. Blair Ebony Smith

Black on Black on Black on Black: An interview with Artist-Scholar Dr. Blair Ebony Smith

The Global History of Black Girlhood edited by Corinne T. Field and LaKisha Michelle Simmons

<i>The Global History of Black Girlhood</i> edited by Corinne T. Field and LaKisha Michelle Simmons

Now It’s My Time! Black Girls Finding Space and Place in Comic Books

This essay examines how Black girl narratives are finding and making space and place in the arena of comic books and television. With the rise in Black girl (super)hero protagonists on the comic book pages and adapted television shows, it is essential to explore the significance of their rising inclusion, visibility, and popularity and understand how they contribute to the discourse surrounding the next generation of heroes. Guided by an Afrofuturist, Black feminist, and intersectional framework, I discuss the progressive possibilities of popular media culture in depicting Black girlhood and adolescence. In Marvel Comics’ “RiRi Williams/Ironheart”, DC Comics’ “Naomi McDuffie”, and Boom! Studios’ “Eve”, these possibilities are evident. Blending aspects of adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, and STEM, each character offers fictional insight into the lived experiences of Black girl youth from historical, aesthetic, and expressive perspectives. Moreover, as talented and adventurous characters, their storylines, whether on the comic book pages or the television screen, reveal a necessary change to the landscape of popular media culture.