Hostile Geographies

Black Girls Fight to Save Themselves and the World

in Girlhood Studies
Author:
Dehanza Rogers Film and Media Department, Emory University, USA dehanza.rogers@emory.edu

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https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1106-8986
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2022.150104
Keywords:
Blackness; classroom; education; film; horror; race; speculative fiction
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Abstract

In this article, I engage in a parallel reading of the consumption of Black girlhood in speculative fiction in the television series The Passage, and the film The Girl with All the Gifts, and in the classroom. In these texts are nonconsensual attempts to harvest biological materials from Black girls, exhibiting the belief that Black bodies are utilitarian, at best, and meant for consumption. Like these narratives, the classroom consumes Black girls physically along with their futures. I explore how Black girl resistance disrupts such consumption and interrogate texts in which Black girls create narratives for themselves. In these narratives, so-called disposable Black girls map out new cartographies of narrative resistance and new liberatory geographies for their future.

Contributor Notes

Dehanza Rogers, MFA (ORCID: 0000-0003-1106-8986) is an award winning Panamanian American filmmaker and an assistant professor in the Film and Media department at Emory University. Her films and research explore Black girlhood, the African Diaspora, as well as participatory and social media as tools of activism and cultural identity. Email: dehanza.rogers@emory.edu

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Girlhood Studies

An Interdisciplinary Journal

Cover Girlhood Studies
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
16
Keywords:
Blackness; classroom; education; film; horror; race; speculative fiction
Print Publication Date:
01 Mar 2022
Online Publication Date:
01 Mar 2022
Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022

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