It's Up and It’s Stuck: Black Girls Cultivating Joy in Digital Spaces

• In Event: You Can’t Steal My Joy! Practices and Possibilities for Black Joy in Urban Education

Abstract

Because Black girls are seen as oppositional to middle-class, white femininity (Hill Collins, 2004), Black girl play is deemed dangerous– not because there is anything inherently violent about Black girl play, but because Black girls continue to be positioned as uninnocent and unworthy of protection within systems of oppression (Gaunt, 2006; Epstein et al., 2017). Our article unpacks the complexity of Black girlhood and celebrates Black joy through an analysis of Black girls’ play and meaning-making in digital spaces (Brown, 2009; Boffone, 2021). A collective of Black women pursuing doctorates in education, we convened to consider the following question: What do we already know and what can we learn about Black girls by analyzing their curation and performance of dance challenges on Instagram? By grounding our approach in Black feminist visual analysis methodologies (hooks, 1992; Evans-Winter, 2019; Dillard, 2021), we found that when Black girls create and perform dance challenges, they are theorizing about their lives while teaching us their place-making and future-building capacities (Butler, 2018). Black girls dancing as praxis allowed us to more fully see Black girls and to notice the ways Black girls make their needs and desires known. This study amplifies the urgency of protecting Black girl students in classrooms, as well as the inner Black girls in Black women teachers. Ultimately, our research offers solutions for how educators can reimagine the learning environments they cultivate for all children, especially Black girls.

Authors

• Margaret Owusu, University of Michigan

• Anna Almore, University of Michigan

• monét cooper, University of Michigan

• Mara D. Johnson, University of Michigan

• Gabrielle Kubi, Boston College

• Christine Quince, Santa Clara University