'Where's the Outrage, Where's the Coverage?' Sakia Gunn and the Possibility of a Queer African American 'Cover Girl'

• In Event: Girlhood Studies: Making Connections, Bridging Divides

Abstract

As I argue elsewhere, the increase in mass-market magazine covers featuring girls—what I call "Cover Girls"—documents the contemporary U.S. cultural fascination with girls. In this paper, I acknowledge this context, but I turn the bulk of my attention to local and alternative media coverage of the death of a girl that did not appear on the cover of mass-market magazines: Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old African American lesbian/trans/AG who died in 2003 in Newark, NJ, when a man who had sexually propositioned her and her friends responded with violence to the young women's explicit statement that they were lesbians.

A common refrain in the local and alternative media coverage of Gunn addressed the fact that mainstream media ignore poor girls of color: "Where's the Outrage, Where's the Coverage"? On the one hand, as this headline insists, the coverage of Gunn as compared to, for example, Matthew Shepard or JonBenet Ramsey, was paltry. On the other hand, from a feminist girls' media studies perspective, I want to claim Gunn as a Cover Girl: she appeared on the cover of the New York Blade, for example, and the alternative/LGBTQ press and on-line sites covered her murder, its aftermath, and the activism that followed her death in some detail, continuing up to the present. I argue that the local and alternative press narratives about Gunn activated some of the typical tropes of cover girlhood (e.g., tragedy, innocence). Yet, at the same time, by telling the story of Gunn's death as a tragic, disruptive, and therefore productive marker of what is wrong with Newark, with specific African American and LGBTQ communities, and with the media, the local and alternative media coverage of Gunn's death mourns and takes action on behalf of both African American and LGBTQ concerns. In this study, then, I identify ways in which dominant narratives impact local stories while also exploring the possibility for finding queer girls of color within media culture. In the process, my goal is to challenge feminist girls' media studies to bring more complexity to its understanding of "girlhood" in U.S. popular culture.

Author

• Sarah Projansky, Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign