Blackgirl, One Word: Necessary Transgressions in the Name of Imagining Black Girlhood

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique C. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Girlhood Studies ◽  
A Site ◽  
Education Discourse

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.

crushed little stars

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-28
Author(s):  
Jordan Ealey
Keyword(s):  
Black Girls ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Girlhood Studies ◽  
A Site

This is a performative engagement with the theory and practice of Black girlhood. I begin with an excerpt from my play-in-process, crushed little stars, which is itself a meditation on the sad Black girl. I share this process of play not only to present play making as a powerful epistemological tool, but also to blur the boundaries between what constitutes theory as opposed to practice. I (re)imagine Black girl sociality as a site of restoration and healing against the racist, sexist, and ageist world with which Black girls are forced to contend. Accordingly, this project contributes to the diversification of girlhood studies, challenging the disciplinarity of the field by extending ethnographic and sociological perspectives to include the vantage point of performance and creative practice.

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

2018 ◽  
pp. 72-100
Author(s):  
Kimberly Lamm
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Iconic Images ◽  
American Media ◽  
A Site

Chapter 2 analyses Angela Davis’s written reflections on her transformation into the ‘imaginary enemy’ of the US nation-state. A spectacle in the most consequential sense, the iconic images of Davis telegraphed across American visual culture in the early 1970s, many of which highlight her Afro, demonstrate that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies of racial and sexual difference can take visual form. Beginning with the FBI’s ‘Wanted’ poster of her, this chapter tracks the images of Davis that circulated through the American media and came close to inscribing the accusation of her criminality into legal truth and commonly held belief. I argue that Davis’s ordeal demonstrates that visual culture serves as a site where the pathologies of racism and sexism compound each other and force black women into positions of subordination, and that it therefore offers a powerful context for understanding the stakes of Piper’s textual interventions into the iconicity of the black female body. Reading a range of Davis’s writings (her autobiography, her letters to George Jackson, her own defence statement) in relation to Piper’s artwork, this chapter shows that Davis also deployed language to contest the legacies of ‘ungendering’ and undo the visual logics that have determined black women’s visibility..

scholarly journals La représentation du corps féminin : ostracisme, stéréotypes et concupiscence dans David’s Story de Zoë Wicomb

2015 ◽  
pp. 31-41
Author(s):  
Férial Khella
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Women Warriors ◽  
Zoe Wicomb ◽  
Work Tasks ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
A Site

This article explores Zoë Wicomb’s complex representation of the Black female body in her first novel David’s Story, which deals mainly with the condition of the female guerrilla fighter during and after the struggle for liberation. These women warriors have served the nation and have contribu-ted to its liberation through their bodies, but have also been silenced and ignored in the post-apartheid era. In addition, they have been subjected to multiple forms of physical and sexual violence by their own comrades within the Anti-apartheid Movement. The Black female body, as it appears in the novel, is a site of power, oppression, violence, and even complicity. The pre-sent work tasks itself, firstly, with analyzing not only how the author deconstructs the stereotypical images of the strong female guerrilla but also those concerning Coloured women’s bodies which have been marked by racial and sexual differences, focusing here especially on the question of concupiscence. Then, I will concentrate on the way the female body is represented and inscribed in language. Finally, I will analyze Zoë Wicomb’s narrative techniques by considering the impossibility of representing the body in the absence of discourse.

Towards an Interdisciplinary Field of Black Girlhood Studies

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 116-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tammy C. Owens ◽  
Durell M. Callier ◽  
Jessica L. Robinson ◽  
Porshé R. Garner
Keyword(s):  
Black Girls ◽  
Annotated Bibliography ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Girlhood Studies

Scholarly interest in the experiences of Black girls has grown significantly. Although many scholars, activists, and artists have completed substantial scholarship and creative works that constitute the foundation of Black girlhood studies, their body of work and names are oftentimes omitted from recent scholarship on Black girlhood. In this collectively authored essay, scholars, artists, and activists present an annotated bibliography of historical and contemporary texts, as well as cultural works, that center the voices and experiences of Black girls. This annotated bibliography serves as a resource for activists and scholars alike who are interested in Black girlhood.

The role of the female body in contesting and negotiating space in sports for women in rural and urban Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-113
Author(s):  
Obert Bernard Mlambo ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Girl Child ◽  
School Sports ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
A Site ◽  
Embodied Practice

This article examined attitudes, knowledge, behavior and practices of men and society on Gender bias in sports. The paper examined how the African female body was made into an object of contest between African patriarchy and the colonial system and also shows how the battle for the female body eventually extended into the sporting field. It also explored the postcolonial period and the effects on Zimbabwean society of the colonial ideals of the Victorian culture of morality. The study focused on school sports and the participation of the girl child in sports such as netball, volleyball and football. Reference was made to other sports but emphasis was given to where women were affected. It is in this case where reference to the senior women soccer team was made to provide a case study for purposes of illustration. Selected rural community and urban schools were served as case references for ethnographic accounts which provided the qualitative data used in the analysis. In terms of methodology and theoretical framework, the paper adopted the political economy of the female body as an analytical viewing point in order to examine the body of the girl child and of women in action on the sporting field in Zimbabwe. In this context, the female body is viewed as deeply contested and as a medium that functions as a site for the redirection, profusion and transvaluation of gender ideals. Using the concept of embodiment, involving demeanor, body shape and perceptions of the female body in its social context, the paper attempted to establish a connection between gender ideologies and embodied practice. The results of the study showed the prevalence of condescending attitudes towards girls and women participation in sports.

scholarly journals Oppression and Female Body: A Feminist Critique of the Novel 'Half the Sky'

2021 ◽  
Vol VI (I) ◽  
pp. 79-85
Author(s):  
Ayesha Khaliq ◽  
Mamona Yasmin Khan ◽  
Rabia Hayat
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sampling Technique ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Interpretive Paradigm ◽  
A Site ◽  
Body Theory

The female body is more than often used as a site to perpetuate violence and oppress women in patriarchal societies. The current study aims to explore how patriarchal oppression targets the female body and how it enforces women to become subalterns having no voice in the selected fictional work, Half the Sky by Kristoff and WuDunn. For this purpose, Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Bryan Turner's The Body theory (1984) are used as theoretical frameworks to explore the selected novel. The research is descriptive qualitative, and placed within the interpretive paradigm. The data for the present study is in the form of textual paragraphs, which is taken from the selected novel and is collected through the purposive sampling technique. The study argues on women's oppression and violence. The findings of the study revealed that the dominancy of male counterpart in every field of life is the basic reason for women oppression which leads to the women being subalterns.

scholarly journals The fiction of History: recalling the past and imagining the future with Caesar at Troy.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Richard Alston
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Site

This essay considers the nature of historical discourse through a consideration of the historical narrative of Lucan’s Pharsalia. The focus is on the manner in which Lucan depicts history as capable of being fictionalised, especially through the operation of political power. The discourses of history make a historical account, but those discourses are not, in Lucan's view, true, but are fictionalised. The key study comes from Caesar at Troy, when Lucan explores the idea of a site (and history) which cannot be understood, but which nevertheless can be employed in a representation of the past. yet, Lucan also alludes to a ‘true history’, which is unrepresentable in his account of Pharsalus, and beyond the scope of the human mind. Lucan’s true history can be read against Benjamin and Tacitus. Lucan offers a framework of history that has the potential to be post-Roman (in that it envisages a world in which there is no Rome), and one in which escapes the frames of cultural memory, both in its fictionalisation and in the dependence of Roman imperial memory on cultural trauma.

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