Black Girls Matter: Activism and Representation Beyond the Binary - Thursday, March 11 at 5:00 PM

The Black Studies and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies programs invite you to a panel conversation: “Black Girls Matter: Activism and Representation Beyond the Binary.” How is police violence against black women and girls determined by socio-economic conditions? How do queer representations in culture shape experiences of marginalization and belonging among racialized communities? What can the lives of African American women in our cities’ informal economies tell us about the intersections of race, class, and gender? Please join us for this important conversation at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the age of Black Lives Matter. Scholars in the field will talk about how their inter-disciplinary research engages with these and related questions, and discuss what it means to work on these pressing issues in our contemporary moment.

Jennifer DeClue is assistant professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Her first monograph, Visitation: Toward A Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema, is currently under contract with Duke University Press. Her previous work on BDSM “Let’s Play: Exploring Cinematic Black Lesbian Fantasy, Pleasure, and Pain” was included in the edited volume No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies. Her most recent publication “Deferral and the Dream: Visualizing the Life and Loves of Lorraine Hansberry” appears in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Moving Image Review, Vol. 27:3 2021.

Shannon Malone Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research sits at the intersection of black feminism and critical criminology in investigating police violence against black women and girls in the United States. Using interviews, observations, and surveys, her work interrogates the social conditions that shape and marginalize black women and girls’ experiences with police across institutional and cultural contexts. Her research has been published in Gender & Society and Social Problems. She has received awards from the American Sociological Association and Association of Black Sociologists, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.

LaShawn Harris is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University and assistant editor for the Journal of African American History (JAAH). Her area of expertise includes 20th century African American and Black Women’s histories. Harris’s scholarly essays have appeared in The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of Women’s History, and SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. Harris’s work has been featured in popular media outlets, including TV-One, Glamour magazine, Elle, Vice, The Huffington Post, and Black Perspectives.  Her first monograph Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2016.  In 2017, Sex Worker, Psychics, and Numbers Runners won the Organization of American Historians (OAH) Darlene Clark Hine Award for the best book in African American women's and gender history, and the Philip Taft Labor Prize from The Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) and the Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) School at Cornell University. Recently, Harris was appointed to the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) prestigious Distinguished Lectureship Program.