Black girl #MeToo digital activism as “feminist pedagogies of complaint”

• In Event: Critical Resisting: Reading, Writing, and Digital Activism

Abstract

Objective
Drawing from a larger 2-year ethnography on girls and school-based #MeToo activism, this paper traces how one Black girl-activist draws from Black feminism and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) learned in a high school feminism class to develop critical consciousness and critical literacies about sexual harassment and rape culture at school. These Black girls’ digital counter-narratives make visible their relentless defense of Black girlhood through Black feminism.

Theoretical framework
This paper brings together Black girlhoods (Brown, 2009, 2013; Evans-Winters, 2011, 2015; Halliday, 2019; Jacobs, 2016; Morris, 2016); Black girl literacies (Muhammad and Haddix, 2016; Kelly, 2018, 2020); and Black feminism as a conceptual framework that deepens Ahmed’s notion of complaint activism (2021), which posits that school-based complaints about sexual harassment have pedagogical implications against institutions that attempt to silence sexual violence.

Methods
Using complaint biography (Ahmed, 2021) as narrative inquiry, this paper explores the Black feminist theorizing that undergird one Black girl-activist’s digital testimony through online blogging, demonstrating the radical possibilities of what happens when Black girls learn Black feminism at school, particularly through a high school curriculum.

Data sources
The student’s blog post and public speaking are used as the objects of analysis.

Substantiated conclusions and implications
A complaint collective (Ahmed, 2021) of girls in a high school feminism class wrote blog posts that featured their complaint activism (Ahmed, 2021) on sexual harassment at school. This digital activism resisted the school’s “happy narratives”(Ahmed, 2012) that claimed the school was supportive of speaking out on behalf of sexual violence. The girls pushed back against the school’s commitment to neoliberal popular feminisms (Banet-Weiser, 2018). By making visible Black girls’ experiences of sexual violence in schools, this research maps #MeToo as curriculum, pedagogy, and activism within the larger context of critical English Education (Morrell, 2005) and critical race English Education (Johnson, 2018).

Scholarly significance
One Black girl-activist’s intersectional feminist resistance reveals that centering the teaching of Black feminist theory is the future of curriculum and pedagogy in the high school 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; Muhammad & Haddix, 2016; Morris, 2016), and have also argued that critical and digital media literacies should provide opportunities for Black girls to “talk back” (hooks, 1989; Jacobs, 2016).
This paper affirms that creating digital texts at school provides Black girls spaces 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). More specifically, this paper highlights how Black girls are reclaiming the #MeToo narrative back for themselves (Butler, 2017).

Author

• Ileana Jiménez, Stony Brook University - SUNY