Entangled Bodies: Black Girls Becoming-Molecular

Abstract

Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming alongside Massumi’s reading of A Thousand Plateaus (1992), I explore how Black girls become educated in the molar assemblage1 of schools: students, teachers, classrooms, bodies raced and gendered by the practices of White schooling. Through readings of narratives of Black girls, I examine how fixed notions of Blackness and girlhood are disrupted by girls becoming-molecular.2 Finally, I consider how Black girls are affected by White schooling spaces and how Black girls’ bodies shift and change schooling spaces by existing in them.

Taught in the Matrix: A Review of Black Girls’ Experiences in U.S. Schools

“…Moreover, curriculum is a cultural artifact that steers the K–12 schooling process by way of teaching, learning, planning and instruction, classroom management, and assessment. When school curricula ignore the narratives and contributions of African American women and girls and people of color, it not only erases Black girls’ history, their contributions and lived realities, it sends a message that education, as a societal structure, disregards Blackness as an intersectional experience (Ohito, 2016; Phipps, 2017).…”

“…In addition to the oppressive pedagogies permeating schools (Patel, 2015), studies show that schools manufacture this “new racism” in other inadvertent ways by disciplining Black girls for how they talk, act, and move about school spaces. Black girls are also surveilled for ways in which they fail to conform to white female notions of femininity in schools (Kelly, 2018; Phipps, 2017). These forms of invisible monitoring and surveillance of Black girls’ bodies through adultification or criminalization, for example, are characterized as dehumanizing acts of “spirit murdering” (Edwards et al, 2016; Love, 2013), because Black girls are denied access to childhood humanity, joy, love, and hope, among other emotions.…”

Aporias at the intersection of geography and feminist science and technology studies: Critical engagements with Black studies

“…Most importantly, while assemblage thinkers are not necessarily more attuned to problematics of power and social difference (see critiques by Kinkaid, 2020a, 2020b), an increasing number of scholars have used an analytic of assemblage to explore the production of race, sexuality, nationalism, and so on (Franklin-Phipps, 2017; Ibrahim, 2014; Puar, 2007; Richmond, 2018; Saldanha, 2007; Weheliye, 2014). With its focus on emergent, but not necessarily flat arrangements of people and things, assemblage thinking has specifically complemented the aims of many feminist and action-oriented science studies scholars (De La Bellacasa, 2011; Murphy, 2006; Wylie, 2018).…”