PRIDE 2025 | Black Queer Girls’ Embodied Proclamations
By Dr. Brittney Miles
We are delighted to present the following submission from our 2025 Pride Series. The present entry, “Black Queer Girls’ Embodied Proclamations” was submitted by Dr. Brittney Miles, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Pride discourses primarily focus on adults and erase queer children who eventually become those adults, excluding a vulnerable and structurally disempowered population. LGBTQIA people do not spawn into being at the age of 18. They make meaning of themselves and negotiate complex politics of self-presentation long before they come of age. However, ideal childhood is constructed as perpetually defined as innocent, assumed asexual, and framed apolitically (Stainton, 2008). These constructions, which are often inaccessible and not afforded to Black children, work to disempower and erase the agency of children as people (Ocen, 2015; Goff et al., 2014). More so, while childhood is constructed as asexual, homophobic accusations and false conflations between being part of the LGBTQ community and pedophilia make it taboo or uncomfortable to grapple with the realities of childhood. This violent and erasing discourse steals the queer childhoods from queer adults and further invisiblizes the fullness of childhood. Together, these ideas make it difficult for scholars to truly engage the lived experiences of queer Black women’s girlhoods, especially in ways that acknowledge and evoke their bodies, agency, and embodied subjectivities.
If we are going to take serious queer Black women's lives, and carry the torch of our Black feminist and womanist foremothers for whom queerness and lesbianism was critical and non-negotiable (see the Combahee River Collective), we have to reckon with queer Black girls and their mattering -- even as it tasks us to overcome our discomforts around children's sexual, romantic, and embodied agency. Specifically, we as Black Women’s Studies Scholars need to see and celebrate queer Black girls and the ways they show up and negotiate their bodily performances in the world. Furthermore, scholars like Dominique C. Hill have demonstrated the need to enter Black girl worlds and allow for transgressions that disrupt the supposed dichotomy and distance between girlhood and womanhood, thereby validating the fullness of both our lives (Hill, 2019). Black queer children are demonstrating a profound knowing of themselves and how they want to show up in the world. Subsequently, deep possibilities of kinship emerge for them and the Black [queer] adults in their lives (Shange, 2019). They are asking us to see them, guide them, and be there to support them as they negotiate their Black queer subjectivities and agency in embodied ways (James, 2011).
Eurocentric constructions of beauty (Tate, 2017) and body size (Strings, 2019) have been used to render Black femmes as other through the use of controlling images and caricature (Collins 2009). Cisheteronormativity has been a key mechanism of these Eurocentric constructions that subsequently position queer and Black aesthetics into the margins (Muñoz, 1994; Ferguson, 2004; Snorton, 2017). However, Black and queer people have always used their embodied politic to transgress normative embodiment in an effort to honor themselves (Snorton 2017). These Black and queer aesthetic histories are a survival strategy. However, it is at the intersection of BlaQueer (Wilson, 2014) that the embodied work of queer Black girls holds a resonate power that calls forth histories of aesthetic resistance from youth, gender, sexual orientation, and racially minoritized people.
Based on photo elicitation interviews with Black women about beauty and girlhood, I developed the concept of beautihood. Beautihood describes the maturation of beauty beliefs and practices across the life course, thereby bridging the gap between girlhood and womanhood. The queer women I interviewed called back to girlhood experiences that demonstrated the need to elevate girlhood's centrality to our understanding of queer Black womanhood, and revealed something powerful about queer Black girlhood.
Queer Black Girl-Women want to be free enough to play in masculinity and generally have the room to explore their sexual and gender identities in embodied ways. One participant named Zoe, a 25-year-old queer woman, said, “Cutting my hair off let me exercise my masculinity… I get to touch masculinity by having no hair, and I adore it.” This experience mirrors the aesthetic validation another participant, Victoria, received from her mother when she was a little girl wanting to wear clothes from the boys' section of department stores. Her mother told her, “[I]f you want to pick out your own clothes, you can.” Victoria said that her mother’s permission was a turning point for her “learning how [she] sets her own beauty standards.” Little Victoria grew into a masculine-presenting Black lesbian who's been more freely renegotiating her gender expression and the way that her womanly masculinity isn't diminished by her wearing clothing that feels good to her. Zoe and Victoria capture the importance of nurturing queer Black girls' self-expression is to the women they become. Their embodied agency begins long before they find the language to describe their sexual and romantic orientations as adults. Their queerness was always there in some way, and it needed to be nurtured, celebrated, and affirmed - without the burden of desire-centric sexual connotation. These accounts and other multiplicities of Black girlhood embodiment are part of my developing book project about the relationship between Black girlhood and womanhood beauty practices and politics.
We can't wait until Black queer girls grow up and are on our television screens in the WNBA or at our local pride events for us to begin to acknowledge them. The embodied expression and agency that matter to the style and flair of being and performing queerness as adults sometimes begin in childhood, thereby calling upon scholars to truly hear and see queer Black girls. As said by bi/pansexual non-binary actor Amandla Stenberg (they/them), “...I’d been out as bisexual, and people have known I’m queer for a long time. I saw some comments that made me chuckle, like, ‘Girl, we been knew!...’” (Mosely, 2018). This “been-knowing” is a recognition of queer Black girlhoods, and in all the ways that queer Black girls come into knowing about their own queerness, they invite you to see and know that they exist and matter.
References
Collins, Patricia. H. 2009[1990]. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and The Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge.
Combahee River Collective. 1997[1977]. "A Black Feminist Statement", Pp. 63–70 in Linda Nicholson (ed.), The Second Wave: A reader in feminist theory. New York: Routledge.
Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Goff, P.A., Jackson, M.C., Di Leone, B.A.L., Culotta, C.M. and DiTomasso, N.A. 2014. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of dehumanizing Black children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106(4): 526-545.
Hill, Dominique C. 2019. “Blackgirl, One Word: Necessary Transgressions in the Name of Imagining Black Girlhood.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 19(4):275-283.
James, Adilia E. E. 2011. “Queer Like Me: Black Girlhood Sexuality on the Playground, Under the Covers, and in the Halls of Academia.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 15(1):41–48.
Mosely, Rachel. 2018. “Amandla Stenberg on Being Proud of Her Sexuality.” Seventeen Magazine. https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/a23287170/amandla-stenberg-on-being-proud-of-her-sexuality/
Muñoz, José Esteban. 1994. Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Ocen, Priscilla A. 2015. "(E)racing childhood: Examining the racialized construction of childhood and innocence in the treatment of sexually exploited minors." UCLA Law Review 62: 1586.
Shange, Savannah. 2019. “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship.” The Black Scholar 49(1):40–54.
Snorton, C. Riley. 2017. Black on both sides: A racial history of trans identity. U of Minnesota Press.
Stainton Rogers, W. 2008. "Promoting better childhoods: Constructions of child concern," Pp. 141-160 in Mary Jane Kehily (ed.), An introduction to childhood studies. Open University Press.
Strings, Sabrina. 2019. Fearing the black body: The racial origins of fat phobia. New York University Press.
Tate, Shirley. 2007. "Black beauty: Shade, hair and anti-racist aesthetics." Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(2):300-319.
Wilson, T. Anansi. 2014. What Is BlaQueer?. BlaQueerFlow. https://blaqueerflow.wordpress.com/about/what-is-blaqueer-2014/
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