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

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.

Keywords

Blackgirls transgression vulnerability feminism subjectivity

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