Choosing Us: Black Girls’ Refusals, Consent, and the Possibilities of Chosen Spaces

Abstract

This study explores how the refusals Black girls make disrupt the ways they are framed as illegible (i.e., invisible, hyper visible, invalid, and dehumanized) in the context of U.S. schools and society, due to the ontological position of Black girls and women in the U.S. Refusals are a method Black girls use to navigate compulsory school learning environments that frame them as always and already deficient. This study highlights how Black girls render themselves and each other legible (i.e., seen, valid, and humanized) through their agentic refusals that occur when they participate in chosen, consent-based learning spaces that they also help co-create. Through a multigenerational approach, this qualitative study centers the lives of three groups of Black girls and women while examining the roles consent and refusal have played throughout their learning experiences. Throughout this study, each of the three groups worked collaboratively to co-construct a Black girl chosen space in which they reflected on their learning experiences, practiced acts of collective care, and engaged in arts-based activities that positioned them to imagine and create (poetry, collages, videos, and more) beyond anti-blackness and the cisheteropatriarchy. In turn, this study highlights the creative potential of Black girlhood (Brown, 2013), deepens understandings of Black Girls’ navigational practices across learning settings (Butler, 2018), and discusses nuanced ways that Black girls engage in meaning making in chosen spaces via the refusals they enact.