Black Girl #MeToo Activism and Literacies as "Feminist Pedagogies of Complaint"

• In Event: Resisting Racist Sexism: Black Girl Literacies and Black Feminist Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Activism

Abstract

This paper traces how two Black girls wrote about sexual harassment at a predominantly white private school using Black feminist digital activism. Drawing from the Black feminist theories they learned in an elective on intersectional feminism (hooks, 1984; Lorde, 1984; Collins, 2009; Combahee River Collective, 1986; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), the girls demonstrate their #MeToo “complaint activism” (Ahmed, 2014) through blogging. Their blog posts became “transformative ruptures” (Delgado Bernal & Aleman, 2017) against their school’s misogynist and racial capitalist discourses that silenced and surveilled them, upending “hegemonic narratives” (de los Rios et al, 2019) about what is considered “appropriate” to write about in English courses (Morrell, 2005). These Black girls’ digital counter-narratives make visible their relentless defense of Black girlhood through Black feminism.

This paper brings together Black girlhoods (Brown, 2009, 2013; Evans-Winters, 2011, 2015; Halliday, 2019; Jacobs, 2016; Lindsey, 2015; Morris, 2016); Black girl literacies (Muhammad and Haddix, 2016; Sealey-Ruiz, 2016; Price-Dennis, 2016; Kelly, 2018, 2020); and Black feminism as a conceptual framework that deepens Ahmed’s notion of complaint activism (2021). This framework allows for tracing the ways in which Black girls read Black feminist theory to launch their own Black girl #MeToo feminist pedagogies of complaint both online and in-person.

To examine how the girls drew from Black feminist theory to enact their #MeToo activism, this study conducts a critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2014) of two blog posts published on the girls’ feminism class blog. The author analyzes the girls’ use of Black feminist theory alongside their critiques of the power structures they contended with at school, engaging Souto-Manning’s call for analyzing “macro-level power inequities and micro-level interactional positionings” (2014). The data source is a public classroom blog from a high school level course on intersectional feminism.


Two Black girls generated a digital counter-archive of complaint activism (Ahmed, 2021) that resist the school’s “happy narratives”(Ahmed, 2012) of neoliberal popular feminisms (Banet-Weiser, 2018) that claimed the school was supportive of speaking out on behalf of sexual violence. By making visible Black girls’ experiences of sexual violence in schools, this maps #MeToo as curriculum, pedagogy, and activism within the larger context of critical English Education (Morrell, 2005) and critical race English Education (Johnson, 2018).

By examining their blog posts, the girls’ intersectional feminist resistance reveal that centering the teaching of Black feminist theory is the future of curriculum and pedagogy in the English classroom. A strong line of Black feminist researchers have long argued for curricula that reflect Black girls back to themselves (Brown, 2009, 2013; Evans-Winters, 2011; Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010; Muhammad & Haddix, 2016; Morris, 2016), and have also argued that critical and digital media literacies should allow Black girls to “talk back” (hooks, 1989; Jacobs, 2016). This paper affirms that creating “digital texts” provides Black girls the opportunity to “question power structures” and “[probe] the intersection of power, language, and identity” in ways that challenge the very forms of domination that silence and surveill them at school (Price-Dennis, 2016).

Author

• Ileana Jiménez, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author