“Flights for Freedom With Her Words”: Black, Latinx, and Polynesian Girls Co-Conspiring Against Misogynoir Through Love

Abstract

I examine how youth racialized and gendered as Black girls co-conspired to challenge misogynoir with their peers racialized and gendered as Latina/x and Polynesian girls. I investigate how they did so within an after-school space at a public charter high school that came to be known as the “Critical Feminisms Club.” Thinking about the space alongside the girls in the club, I reveal how they politically and pedagogically engaged love to (a) (re)author the stories of Black girls and (b) challenge the material and ideological misogynoir that circumscribed Black girls’ lives, possibilities, and futurities within their lives and schooling. They (re)narrated how they should be in relation with and responsible to each other as collective, co-relational, and interdependent beings, recognizing how Black womanness/girlness was a genre of being human that was specifically targeted for enclosure, exploitation, and elimination. Their love-politics engaged pedagogy to remake the world such that the safety and protection of Black girls and gender-nonconforming youth was a necessity and priority, which they saw in turn as bound to the safety and protection of the non-Black identified Latina/x and Polynesian girls who accepted this interdependence and mutual responsibility.