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This article discusses the potential of promoting the critical consciousness and positive racial and gender identity development of adolescent Black girls through implementing a curriculum grounded in Black feminist thought and critical media pedagogy. By using bell hooks' (1992) "oppositional gaze" concept as a frame, it argues that Black girls' development of a critical lens and analytic skills is tied to images in the media and central to their positive development. The article draws on qualitative data from a larger phenomenological study that explores how adolescent Black girls who attend independent schools employ critical lenses to understand their experiences around race, gender, and class. This study presents vignettes that illustrate how the different components of a Black feminist critical media pedagogy curriculum come together to support the developing of the oppositional gaze of Black girls.
Keywords: Black girls, adolescence, Black feminist thought, critical pedagogy, racial socialization, gender socialization, media literacy
INTRODUCTION
In her essay "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators," bell hooks (1992) presented the idea of the "oppositional gaze" as a way for people in subordinate positions to resist the dominant images and messages that communicate their devalued status. Specifically, hooks describes "the gaze" as
A site of resistance for colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that "looks" to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating "awareness" politicizes "looking" relations-one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. (p. 116)
Developing an oppositional gaze is especially important for adolescent Black girls who continue to grow up in an environment in which Black girls and women are continually relegated to the role of "the Other" (hooks, 1992, p. 95) in society. As "the Other," Black girls historically and currently possess a "status as outsiders [that] becomes the point from which other groups define their normality" (Collins, 2009, p. 77). The marginalization of Black girls is evident in that they continue to be an underresearched population in the social sciences, especially within the field of education (Evans-Winters, 2011; Henry, 1998; Mirza, 1992; Ward & Robinson, 2006). When Black girls are included in research, their experiences are often subsumed...