(Re)Framing the Social Organization of Black Girls in All-Girl Gangs and All-Girl Peer Groups as Resistance

• In Event: Intersectionality as critical framing: New knowledge about identity, belonging and resistance

Abstract

The ways middle and high school-aged Black girls organize themselves in all-girl gangs and peer groups serves as a platform for expanding our understandings of their everyday resistance strategies. Schools and communities readily readily reject Black girls’ strengths, and black girls actively counter this rejection. Girls create new ways of knowing about themselves and the world through relationships. Identifying these groups as a team that are codependent working towards shared goals, this project uses Erving Goffman’s framework for dramaturgical conceptions of a team. These girls work to change their locus in the world and the way the world engages them.

Presenter

• Brittney Miles, University of Cincinnati