Using Laura Alexandra Harris' conception of a queer Black feminism, I evaluate stories from my girlhood to learn what lessons can be learned about young female sexuality when the researcher works from a position of pleasure. I contend that my secret quests to satisfy my same-sex sexual desires led me to begin the process of cultivating self-awareness, or subjectivity, and personal agency at an early age.
Black girls in the United States begin to discuss and face issues concerning sexuality in elementary school. However, the contemporary youth sexuality literature focuses on the problems of pubescent youth. Within the small body of research that considers preadolescent children's sexual experiences, Black girls are largely invisible. The omission of young Black girls from the youth sexuality literature suggests that Black girls have the same experiences as White girls or, equally as disconcerting, that preadolescent Black girls are not sexual subjects, do not endure peer sexual harassment, do not express their sexual identities, and do not challenge sexual standards. Using data sources that are integral to Black feminist theorizing, including personal narratives, published memoirs, news stories, and qualitative research, the author interrogates the validity of these underlying assumptions. This essay exposes the ways in which youth sexuality researchers silence and distort prepubescent Black girls' sexualities.
Scholars have found that privileged, white individuals in integrated neighborhoods construct narratives that people of color (POC) have relationships with pets that are culturally different and morally questionable. They use these narratives to justify surveilling, punishing, and excluding their POC neighbors. How do privileged white people come up with the pet-related narratives they use as part of racialization processes? The dual purposes in this paper are to identify the constitutive elements of the intensive pet parenting ideology and show how individuals rely on this ideology to construct pet-related, racialized narratives. I extend the current discussion about the use of pet-related, racialized narratives by taking a closer look at the white-dominated veterinary profession. I conducted 44 in-depth interviews with a racially-diverse group of employed veterinarians and veterinary college students to determine if and how they rely on the intensive pet parenting ideology to explain a broad racial/ethnic process such as occupational segregation. Respondents proposed that POC cultures do not promote a self-sacrificing love for common pet species that would engender a passion for veterinary medicine within individuals of color. In this manner, they drew on the intensive pet parenting ideology to both racialize people and naturalize POC exclusion from the veterinary profession.
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