In Search of Radical Love: Mapping Sociospatial Archives of Black Girlhood

• In Event: Thinking Spatially About Black Schoolgirls' Geographies

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes
Black girls defy socio-spatial boundaries and create sanctuaries for themselves in a world that often mis-recognizes their existence. One such example of this imaginative resilience is The Colored Girls Museum in Germantown, Philadelphia. This paper unpacks how The Colored Girls Museum creates programming, pedagogy and praxis that unearths past, present, and future experiences with Black girls in Philadelphia. Specifically, I analyze how Black girls remember, create rituals, and reimagine through their engagement with staff, one another and the museum’s artifacts. I also investigate how local histories and their own geographies map onto these young women's identities.

Perspectives
Given their unique vantage point by virtue of our social location, Black girls deeply understand the sociological constructs of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989 and King, 1988) and the matrix of domination (Collins, 2002). America’s white-dominated society has misrecognized, suppressed, and dominated Black girls for centuries (Davis, 1981; Harris-Perry, 2011). Black Girls have also resisted, fought, and imagined beyond our current circumstances. (Brown, 2017; Hartman, 2019; hooks, 1993; Nash, 2013; Perry, 2018; Walker, 2004). How they emotionally and spatially and temporally respond, internalize, reject, and conceptualize the world around them deserves empirical documentation.

Methods and Data
I use qualitative methods of virtual oral history, participant observation, and focus groups with The Colored Girl Museum’s participants and interlocutors ages 14-18 via a convenience sample where they recount their interactions with artifacts, people and space. I will share critical ethnography of thematic findings and affective analysis of body language and emotions. I will also display creative products, such as audio collages and story maps, to illustrate the possibilities of radical love that are available to Black girls in sacred homeplaces and community archives that are marked for themselves.

Substantiated Conclusions
I overwhelmingly found that The Colored Girls Museum is an important site for inquiry, serving as proof that cultural work allows us to remember, preserve, celebrate and affirm Black girls’ geographies towards freedom. Specifically, I witnessed how Black Girls have conceived of harnessing their emotions, relationships, and spatiotemporality to foster, reclaim and locate our power within. Through their radical imagination and love, they are each pursuing place-making efforts (Hunter et al., 2016) that reflect their humanity in a world that so often refuses to do so.

Scholarly Significance
This paper interrogates how understanding the implications of intersectionality, specifically the nexus of race and gender impacts constructions of affect, space and time. Traditional narratives and gender stereotypes of femininity fall apart when applied to Black Girls (Williams, 2018). Both the unique combination of emotional and physical labor that Black Girls have been subjected to under white supremacy and the intragroup toxic masculinity must be integrated outside of traditional description of Girlhood. Black Girls’ situated knowledge has uniquely positioned them to be research participants to conceptualize theory and praxis of radical placemaking.

(References removed due to word count.)

Author

• Loren Cahill, Smith College