Black Gurl Reliable: Pedagogies of Vulnerability and Transgression [Hardcover]

Black Gurl Reliabledoes the original work of curating Black girls’ and women’s experiences and experiential knowledge, indexing sociocultural tactics (schooling) that foreclose Black girl aliveness, while advancing embodiment as a key ingredient of Black mattering. Elevating Black Girlhood Studies as an ethos, narratives presented offer redress to inequities and hauntings of race-gender structures of dominance and position Black girls and girlhood as more than lamentation and what happens to the body. Hill solicits the strength and utility of arts-based methods in capturing identity, performance, and experimental design for ephemerality and improvisation. Hill makes clear Black feminism’s insistence that knowledge and possibility are produced through the body.

As a means of mitigating the deleterious effects of schooling on Black girls’ and women’s bodies and making legible the insights and knowledge produced from schooling experiences, Hill introduces the concept of Transgressngroove. This living feminist practice explores the relationships between Black girlhood, education, and the body, as researched for over a decade through workshops, consulting, classrooms, personal development, and other teaching/learning spaces.An ethnographic interrogation of the social and educational forces that overinscribe Black girlhood“In the intersections of a body scholarship and the soul of a personal journey, Dr. Dominique Hill illustrates new insights concerning Black Girlhood and Black Womn's Studies. Here in this book, poetry, dance, the gifts of 'knowing,' and memory become the urgent and embodied inspirationBlack Gurl Reliable. This is a book of distinction and a long-awaited addition to the canon of Feminist and Gender Studies, Performance Studies, Black Studies, Pedagogical Theory, and exercises in liberation.”
—DaMaris B. Hill, author ofBreath Better Spent: Living Black Girlló*