Engaging Endarkened Storywork to Spotlight Women of Color: Reclaiming Narrative Through Microaffirmations in Film School

• In Event: Past and Present: Examining Racial Microaggressions and Racial Microaffirmations Within Educational Research

Abstract

Objectives
Women of Color (WOC) film students face discouraging odds of landing key creative roles in Hollywood. With underrepresented female directors representing fewer than 1% of top grossing film directors in the U.S., aspiring WOC film students lean on one another to fight the odds and build pipelines into the industry where little to none exist. In this paper, I share insights to the way my collaborators, MFA WOC film students, built community through verbal, written, and visual racial microaffirmation (Solórzano & Perez Huber, 2020). While findings also illustrate the harmful impact of racial microaggressions as modes of narrative erasure, I turn to stories of racial microaffirmations, to spotlight narrative modes of empowerment in film school contexts.

Theoretical Frameworks
Using a Critical Race Feminist framework, this paper examines intersecting and simultaneous forms of oppression, in order to contextualize the lived experiences of WOC through counterstorytelling (Yosso, 2006). Additionally, the collaborative and co-constructive nature of storytelling captured in this study demonstrates storytelling as a theory building activity (Ochs et. al. 1992) to inform when and how narrative empowerment emerges in storytelling. Furthermore, this work places multiple narrative-based frameworks, including small story analysis (Georgakopoulou, 2015), in conversation with one another in order to locate and name the shared narrative episteme for WOC Film Students.

Methods and Epistemologies
For this project, the process of creating Cinematic Composite Critical Race Counterstories (CCRCC) includes narrative analysis of seven oral life history interviews, to identify small stories and synthesize their qualitative contributions through Endarkened Storywork (Toliver, 2022) in order to arrive at composite characters and storylines. Toliver’s conceptualization of Endarkened Storywork emerges from endarkened epistemologies (Dillard, 2000), Indigenous storywork (Archibald, 2008), and Afrofuturism (Womack, 2013), to recover Black storytelling and offer an important paradigm shift for future of qualitative research. In this paper, I discuss how Chicana Feminist Epistemologies (Delgado Bernal, 1999) offer us further tools to add to the collective strength of this method when working with a group of WOC from multiple ethnic and racial backgrounds.

Findings
The storylines and characters to emerge from this work speak to the individual and relational experiences of WOC. Narrative analysis revealed emotional shifts, temporal shifts in narration, and tangential, but relevant details, in the breaking of the fourth wall for moments of collaborative analysis. Ultimately, I found that this group of Women of Color film students each responded to the isolation felt as a result of constant racial and gendered microaggressions, by seeking out and affirming one another. Stories shared here were missing pieces of a bridge they built back to understanding their film school education, paved by the microaffirmations they shared with other WOC.

Scholarly Significance
In addition to making these stories hearable, this project moves to make these stories visible as animated short films that serve as Cinematic renditions of Composite Critical Race Counterstories (Yosso, 2006). Once complete, these animated shorts will serve as pedagogical tools and a contribution to Critical Race scholarship for, by, and about WOC.

Author

• Brenda Y. Lopez, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author