Structured Violence in the Everyday: How Black Girls Navigate Precarity in the Home and School

• In Event: 4104 - Sexual Violence and Intersectional Inequalities

Abstract

Mainstream and local ideologies shape the perception of Black girls in school settings as domineering, hypersexual, and aggressive. These evaluations are consequential for how girls are disciplined and punished. Informed by Priscilla Ocen’s work on liminal childhood (2015) and Epstein, Blake, and González’s work on adultification (2017), I argue that Black girls are constructed outside of the normative category of girl. To be outside of the mainstream category of girl, increases Black girls’ exposure to sexual violence and assault because they are not seen as a group worth protecting. In this paper, I call this exposure exclusionary vulnerabilities – those that emerge when Black girls are pushed out of their homes and schools and result in exposure to violence, abuse, and exploitation.
Exclusionary vulnerabilities compel girls to make a series of formal and informal moves as they seek safety and support. Institutional responses to girls who cope with neglect and violence in their interpersonal lives can lead to their displacement in spaces that are ostensibly safe- including schools. I illume how the relationship between exclusionary spaces in education and sexual violence work in tandem to exacerbate the isolation and neglect girls experience in their daily lives. Based on a two year ethnographic project, I examine the story of Samaji, a sixteen-year-old participant at the time, who makes alternative moves to secure pathways of love, support, and stability while living in precarity.

Author

• Kenly E. Brown, University of California, Berkeley