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Girlhood Unscripted: A Homeless Black Girls Video Narratives and the New Terrain of Representation

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

Published online on

Abstract

The article examines impromptu video narratives produced by a Black 9-year-old girl Kiara during the video-making sessions at the shelter for homeless families in Columbia, South Carolina. I argue that these video narratives create a new discourse of girlhood that ruptures existing media, popular culture, and other societal scripts about girlhood and disenfranchised communities—a discourse of girlhood unscripted—which brings into play the complex intersections of class, ethnicity, race, and gender and produces a new realm of representation. Drawing on her daily experiences of poverty, hunger, violence, incarceration, and racism, Kiara’s narratives also pose a challenge to the field of girlhood studies which continues to focus on White, middle-class femininity thereby creating a scholarly trap of representation.