Imagining Black Womanhood: The Negotiation of Power and Identity within the Girls Empowerment Project

5. Africentric Womanist Femininity Meets Decent Girl Femininity

5 Africentric Womanist Femininity Meets Decent Girl Femininity That makes me think about what femininity is, like how it is a spectrum and you can define what it is for yourself and it doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other. (Cheryl, program coordinator, age twenty-five) So here we are with our standards, but whose standards are we presenting to the girls, whose standards are we telling the girls are OK? (Roxanne, administrative director, age fifty-four) Femininities are social scripts that contain abstract ideals for what members of the category of woman are and should be. They are culturally and socially appropriate road maps for “what to do” and “how to be” a woman (Schippers 2004). While all forms of femininity are constructed in the context of the overall subordination of women to men, they are also constructed in relation to other femininities (Connell 1987). In other words, Black women’s reality is much more complicated than one of an external white society objectifying black women as the Other with a unified Black community staunchly challenging these external assaults. Instead, Black women find themselves in a web of cross-cutting relationships, each presenting varying combinations of images and Black women’s self definitions. (Collins 1991, 96) 99 In this chapter, I explore GEP staff’s Africentric womanist femininity and GEP girls’ decent girl femininity. Specifically, drawing upon their Africentric womanist ideology, GEP women identified self-definition, selfdetermination , and sexual agency as three key qualities of an Africentric womanist femininity. This femininity became the staff’s “standard” and, as a result, alternative Black femininities were marginalized within the organization . Yet GEP girls were not empty vessels waiting to be filled with the Africentric womanist cup. They brought their own nascent decent girl Black femininity into the program. Their femininity, grounded in the realities of Sun Valley, also emphasized self-definition, self-determination, and sexual agency, however, aspects of the girls’ “how to be” and “what to do” regarding Black femininity differed from that put forth by the staff. AFRICENTRIC WOMANIST FEMININITY For GEP women, Africentric womanist femininity represented an oppositional identity that could support Black women’s and girls’ internal validation as well as external success. For GEP staff, strong girls and powerful women were those who were able to self-define, self-determine, and act as agents of their own sexuality. Self-Definition GEP staff understood self-definition as the ability to define who you are on your own terms. This was a critical component of Africentric womanist femininity . Ife noted that “a strong sense of self” was one of the biggest challenges facing young Black girls. She stated: It’s a challenge, and I don’t know if I can articulate it, because I know I’m really scared and feeling unknowledgeable about it, but I think that if females don’t have a strong identity and a strong sense of self, there are some external factors that are going to do a lot of defining for us. (executive director, age thirty-six) Collins (1991) argues that self-definition is a “preoccupation” of Black women that underscores their struggle to “reconcile the contradictions separating [their] internally defined images of self as African American women with [their] objectification as the Other” (94). GEP staff echoed this concern . Self-definition was considered critical to Black women’s and girls’ 100 IMAGINING BLACK WOMANHOOD health, sanity, and survival. For example, in response to the question “What is a healthy or successful Black woman?” Asha remarked: You no longer perceive yourself on how the outside world perceives you . . . you self-define yourself, and there is a big honoring inside of you. (program coordinator, age twenty-six) Similarly, Cheryl noted: When I was growing up messages were just like, “You are supposed to”—all that stuff about the good girl box, the values you are supposed to have. You are supposed to be intelligent, but not outshine guys, not have your intelligence be a threat to males. You are supposed to be beautiful and well kept—do the whole makeup thing, but not that sexy where you are attracting all this attention on you. . . . It’s not even a myth about the Black woman having to be strong and stuff because that is what we had to do in our experience here but that shouldn’t be, the vision shouldn’t be limited to just that. . . . What a...