Organizing sensibilities of a radical Black girlhood

This dissertation is an exploration and examination of the role of sensibilities for organizing a radical Black girlhood as practiced in SOLHOT. While Black girlhood is often researched academically and conceptualized publicly in media through categories of representation such as (1) the dichotomy of hyper/invisibility, (2) silence/loudness, (3) sexualization, (4) resilience and resistance, this dissertation extends the work of Ruth Nicole Brown, whose work posits Black girlhood as an organizing construct intent on politicizing Black girlhood beyond gender binaries and “girls program” language and objectives as learned through the collective SOLHOT (Brown, 2013). As an organizer with SOLHOT since 2007, this dissertation approaches Black girlhood through my work as an organizer and offers that working with SOLHOT cultivates a kind of sensibility based on relationships created, the histories and experiences of people involved in the praxis and lessons learned over the years. Through examining Black girlhood as a practice through SOLHOT, I highlight visual, smell, feeling and emotion as a mode of inquiry and evaluation. As such, sensibilities are defined here as the understandings and connections made through employing the senses to engage with complex interactions, emotions and aesthetic influences. Sensibilities then offer an opportunity to consider the possible alternative archival articulations of Black girlhood made possible by engaging the practice. Through engaging Black feminism, Black radical traditions and Black girlhood, this project theorizes how my analysis of sensibilities might point us to an alternative to the limits of representational discourse and practices (Williamson, 2017) specific to Black girlhood. Importantly, this dissertation reveals the limits of representation and offers possibilities for engaging Black culture by exploring my own constant practice with SOLHOT as an organizer of the collective since 2007. Using autoethnography steeped in the Black feminist tradition as exemplified by the work of Irma McClarin, Aisha Durham, as well as SOLHOT scholars, I account for my experience as an organizer of SOLHOT and an embodiment of the ways in which these sensibilities are experienced, this project relies on my organizational knowledge gained through constant practice and insistence on SOLHOT as a part of my own politics and work. Moreover, this project utilizes the data of stories, visual and sonic documentation and work I organized with SOLHOT. Additionally, through meditating on the processes that allowed for me to engage this work, I name “shimmer” and “funk” as specific examples of how my experiences with SOLHOT reveal the limits and possibilities of representation. Ultimately, the exploration of these processes interrogates the ways in which my experience organizing SOLHOT offers engaging sensibilities as a radical articulation of Black girlhood.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communications and Media

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Robinson, Jessica Lauren

Contributors dc:contributor

• Brown, Ruth N
• Molina-Guzman, Isabel
• Smith, Blair E
• Hamilton, Kevin

• Solhot
• Black Girlhood

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Jessica Robinson

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124580

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124580