THE ISSUE + QUESTIONS
Shifting the gaze off of Black girls and onto systems.
Historically, research has been centered on individual-focused models of sexual risk and neglected the systemic roots and conditions of Black girls’ sexual vulnerability, specifically intersecting identities such as gender, race, class, and age-based inequalities. To date, when studies examine how policies influence social inequity in sexual health for populations, they are usually along a single axis (i.e., race) and not at the intersections that create differential outcomes (Bowleg, 2012).
Moreover, there is a paucity of research that focuses on how the afterlife of slavery (Hartman, 2006; Sharpe, 2016) , obstetric racism (Davis, 2019), and the long history of reproductive violence (Roberts, 1997) influence the sexual and reproductive health of Black girls.
I want to know…
How are Black girls’ sexual lives affected by the conditions of social inequality, including their intersectional identities, access to resources such as education and healthcare, historical and institutional violence, and systems of power like ageism that work to deny their youth sexual rights?
How have histories of reproductive violence and obstetric violence shaped Black girls interactions with sexual and reproductive health systems?
Black Girls sexual and reproductive lives are shaped.
Wake work tells us that Black girls’ sexual vulnerability can be traced back to a long-standing history of social injustice, particularly the converging experiences of racialized and sexual violence (Sharpe, 2016). It is time to call into question the prevailing notion that it is sex that puts girls at risk, but rather the interlocking systems of misogyny, racism, adultism, and economic injustice (Bay-Cheng, 2020).
What policies and social norms exist in Black girls’ sexual lives?
In what ways do these policies and social norms produce the prevailing discourse about Black girls’ sexuality?
What are connections between their material conditions and these discourses? And further, how does this affect Black girls’ adverse sexual and reproductive health outcomes?
“… our individual lives are always swept up in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery.”
- Christina Sharpe, In The Wake
Black girls pursue abolition in their sexual lives.
Black girls continue to lead work that disrupts current inequity in spite of intersecting discrimination and oppression. Despite their lack of adequate representation in formal political and policy-making institutions, presently and throughout history, young people have undoubtedly participated, contributed to, and catalyzed pivotal changes in our social, economic, and political systems (Black Girls 2020; Brown, 2008; Cox, 2015; Love; 2019). Despite this meaningful reality, little is known about how Black girls apply this to systems impacting their sexual lives.
“Abolition is not a synonym for resistance; it encompasses the ways in which Black people and our accomplices work within, against, and beyond the state in the service of collective liberation.”
- Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia
I Ask…
What collective strategies of abolition, self-protective factors, and resiliency do Black girls’ exhibit around their sexual/intimate lives?
How do they build personal and collective power, heal from trauma, advocate on behalf of themselves and their sisters, and work to transform the conditions, systems, and policies that lead to intergenerational cycles of violence and marginalization?
What is possible when Black girls are given the room to create meaning around their own sexual lives and have that meaning shape the systems and institutions designed to serve them?
METHODS MIXTAPE
TRACK 1: SPEAK IT.
Focus groups. Interviews. Phone calls. Group chats. Stoop chatter.
TRACK 2: HEAR It.
Listen to Black girls. See Black girls. Listen to Black girls.
TRACK 3: DREAM IT.
Vision Maps. Visionary Fiction. Co-Design. Futuring.
TRACK 4: BUILD IT.
Policies. Programs. System Reform. New Possibilities.