Shapeshifters : Black girls and the choreography of citizenship / Aimee Meredith Cox.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cox, Aimee Meredith, 1971- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African American girls--Michigan--Detroit.

African American girls.

Homeless girls--Michigan--Detroit.

Homeless girls.

African American homeless persons--Michigan--Detroit.

African American homeless persons.

Michigan--Detroit.

Physical Description:

xvi, 280 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2015.

Summary:

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. Drawing on eight years of fieldwork at a local shelter for women and girls, 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

"We came here to be different": the Brown family and remapping Detroit

Renovations

Narratives of protest and play

Sex, gender, and scripted bodies

The move experiment.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-272) and index.

ISBN:

9780822359432

082235943X

9780822359319

0822359316

OCLC:

892878735