Shapeshifters
Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship
Seiten
2015
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8223-5943-2 (ISBN)
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8223-5943-2 (ISBN)
In this ethnography of the Fresh Start homeless shelter in Detroit, Aimee Meredith Cox shows how the shelter's residents—young black women whose average age is twenty—critique their social marginalization and find creative ways to exercise their agency.
In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.
In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.
Aimee Meredith Cox is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University.
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Part I. Terrain
Introduction 3
1. "We Came Here to Be Different": The Brown Family and Remapping Detroit 38
Part II. Scripts
2. Renovations 81
3. Narratives of Protest and Play 122
Part III. Bodies
4. Sex, Gender, and Scripted Bodies 155
5. The Move Experiment 185
Epilogue 237
Notes 243
References 263
Index 273
Erscheint lt. Verlag | 14.8.2015 |
---|---|
Verlagsort | North Carolina |
Sprache | englisch |
Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
Gewicht | 567 g |
Themenwelt | Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte |
Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Volkskunde | |
Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies | |
ISBN-10 | 0-8223-5943-X / 082235943X |
ISBN-13 | 978-0-8223-5943-2 / 9780822359432 |
Zustand | Neuware |
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