Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research (original) (raw)

Transgressngroove: an exploration of black girlhood, the body, and education

2014

Blackgirls have recently begun to receive focused attention in the discipline of education. Usually, we are compared to our White female or Black male counterparts and/or located within frameworks designed without our bodies and realities considered. Failure to recognize the simultaneity of race and gender operating in the lives of Blackgirls results in a reduction of our livelihood into gender and/or race narratives void of our specific experiences. Alongside the diminution is the unfair reading of Black femininity through lenses of Whiteness, White femininity, and Black masculinity. Attune to how Blackness and femininity differentially mark Black female bodies and the scant documentation of how we make meaning of our experiences, this auto/ethnography interrogates the dialectical between culture, the Black female body, and Black girlhood. This study foregrounds Black female bodies; mine particularly, to illumine the schooling and educational experiences of Blackgirls. It names silence, stereotyping, and shame as trends of Black girlhood and documents how they play out in Blackgirls' and Black women's lives. In contrast, body-activation, voice-instigation, and imagining emerged as tools for resisting, healing, and counteracting the aforementioned trends. Venturing into three community spaces-academe, Blackgirls, and my family-that reveal a feminist, body-centered praxis, transgressngroove. As a process-oriented investigation this study's contributions highlight Black feminist (and Black girl) ways of knowing (in education), expands the budding area of Black Girlhood Studies and narratives, and introduces a praxis that mobilizes vulnerability to facilitate self-aware and body activated educational experiences.

Imagining New Hopescapes: Expanding Black Girls' Windows and Mirrors

Research on Diversity in Youth Literature , 2018

In this article, the author conducts a meta-analysis of 12 studies in which researchers analyze Black girl representations in fiction literature. The studies are used to investigate which fiction books scholars use in their research with Black girls and what influences the researchers to make their book selections. The author uses information gleaned from the analysis to examine which mirrors and windows are constructed and how publishing influences and constrains Black girl representations. To assist in imagining new hopescapes and to disrupt the systemic publishing cycle, the author concludes the article with a list of science fiction and fantasy texts featuring Black female protagonists.

"Unmanageable": Exploring Black Girlhood, Storytelling, and Ideas of Beauty

Open Cultural Studies, 2022

This article explores how Black women use storytelling to construct their Black girlhood on the axes of Black hair and beauty politics. The study includes a discourse analysis of a series of focus groups with a student organization dedicated to Black women's natural hair at a midwestern predominantly white institution. I ask: How do young Black women use storytelling as a tool to construct, recall, and (re) negotiate their childhood experiences of hair and beauty politics? I explore the ways these women use storytelling to articulate how their Black girlhood was in part shaped by encounters with hair politics and constructions of beauty. These "hair moments" that they recall reveal complex negotiations of standards of beauty. I analyze three themes that emerge from these conversations: (1) shared experiences around play, imagination, and relationship to images of mainstream beauty; (2) family as a social unit that socializes Black girls around beauty; and (3) adolescence, prom, and contested notions of appropriate "formal" adornment. These themes among these young women illustrate shared experiences, negotiation/critique, and meaning making around concepts of beauty. This study contributes to conversations around beauty culture, Black hair politics, and the bourgeoning field of Black girlhood studies. Through understanding how Black women reflect on their girlhood experiences of the politics of hair and beauty, we can better understand the inner experiences of Black girls, and the complexities of how they come to know and understand their bodies.

Narrative Significations of Contemporary Black Girlhood

This article examines how Black girlhood is constructed through fiction. The following research question guided this study: How do writers represent the heterogeneity of urban teenage girls in school-sanctioned African American young adult literature? Five popular narratives that exemplify the contemporary lives of urban African American female pre/teenage protagonists represent the data. Utilizing a Black feminist epistemological framework coupled with a complementary theory of adolescent identity development, we analyze the symbolic textual representations along with the protagonists’ decision making and situational depictions. We argue that the protagonists’ textual heterogeneity manifests across the texts through four enactments of identity: intellectual, physical, kinship, and sexual. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications for educators and researchers alike.

Toward a Black Feminist Criticism

I do not know where to begin. Long before I tried to write this I realized that I was attempting something unprecedented, something dangerous, merely by writing about Black women writers from a feminist perspective and about Black lesbian writers from any perspective at all. These things have not been done. Not by white male critics, expectedly. Not by Black male critics. Not by white women critics who think of themselves as feminists. And most crucially not by Black women critics, who, although they pay the most atten-tion to Black women writers as a group, seldom use a consistent feminist analysis or write about Black lesbian literature. All segments of the literary world-whether establishment, progressive, Black, female, or lesbian---do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that Black women writers and Black lesbian writers exist.