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Virginia Tech

Escucha Nuestras Voces/Luister Naar Onze Stemmen: Afro-Caribbean Girlhood in the Dutch West Indies

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

The purpose of this project was to examine how Afro-Caribbean girls from the island of Sint Maarten narrate, navigate and negotiate their girlhood experiences. As a Black woman from Sint Maarten, this project is important due to the lack of sociological scholarship surrounding Black girls in the Dutch West Indies. This project utilized a qualitative approach that involved interview participant photography and semi-structured audio and video recorded interviews with 9 Afro-Caribbean girls who were 14-, 16- and 17-years old living in Sint Maarten. I analyzed the interview data and interpreted it using a combination of Black, Caribbean and transnational feminist frameworks which I named Afro-Caribbean transnational feminism. This framework specifically centers the lives and lived experiences of the girls. The findings show that Afro-Caribbean girls in Sint Maarten navigate their social worlds by negotiating different aspects of their lives, including their hair, appearance and food consumption to in various ways resist heteronormative ideas in Sint Maarten. This data serves as an important starting point and experiential reference to understand Afro-Caribbean girlhood in the Caribbean broadly, and specifically in the Dutch West Indies.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Sociology
Department dc:contributor.department
Sociology
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2020

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Murrell, Gerlyn
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Brunsma, David L.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Bondy, Jennifer M.
  • Baldwin, Andrea N.

Subjects

dc:subject × 5

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:25893
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/98819

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Murrell, Gerlyn. Escucha Nuestras Voces/Luister Naar Onze Stemmen: Afro-Caribbean Girlhood in the Dutch West Indies. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/98819