Shapeshifters
Subtitle: Black girls and the choreography of citizenship
By: Aimee Meredith Cox
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780822359319; 9780822359432
Subjects: African American girls; Homeless girls; African American homeless persons
Other titles: Black girls and the choreography of citizenship
Description: "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."--Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-272) and index.
Table of contents: title: "We came here to be different": the Brown family and remapping Detroit; title: Renovations; title: Narratives of protest and play; title: Sex, gender, and scripted bodies; title: The move experiment.