“Unmanageable”: Exploring Black Girlhood, Storytelling, and Ideas of Beauty

Blackness, Beauty, and Hair Politics

Since modernity, engendered in part by colonialism, slavery, and discrimination, Eurocentrism and anti-Black racism interact in order to denigrate what are viewed as phenotypically “Black” features (Mercer, Patton, Rooks, Russell-Cole et al., Tate). Regarding concepts of beauty, the result of this interaction is a privileging of features associated with whiteness – pale skin, long and straight hair, thin angular noses, and thin bodies. Meanwhile, dark skin, kinky hair textures, large lips, large round noses, and large/curvy bodies are often denigrated. Ideas of “Eurocentric” or “White supremacist” beauty standards have been theorized in order to understand the ways that mainstream beauty standards have socio-historically privileged these corporeal features most closely linked to whiteness (Byrd and Tharps, Hunter, Lake). An idealizing of these Eurocentric beauty ideals has been documented across populations of people of color, and across the African diaspora, throughout time and space.

One way that this privileging of the Eurocentric has been argued to manifest is the notion of “colorism.” Robinson defines colorism as “a system of privileges, benefitting Blacks and other people of color with phenol-typical features commonly found among Whites, particularly lighter skin color and straighter hair textures” (Robinson 362). Robinson suggests that colorism and the aforementioned kinds of hair hierarchies are intrinsically linked. Indeed, historically, “tests” were done to determine if Black people’s skin was light enough or their hair was “good” enough to be accepted in certain social spaces. While evaluations like the “brown paper bag test” functioned to police skin tones, evaluations like the “comb test” concurrently policed hair textures (Byrd and Tharps). Obiagele Lake’s work depicts advertisements for products as far back as the 1880s that promised to make “kinky hair grow long and wavy” (Lake 54).

As Black feminist theory reminds us, it is imperative that we think about systems such as race and gender together, as they constantly co-construct and inform each other (Collins, Collins and Bilge, Crenshaw, Davis, hooks, Lorde, Wallace). Accordingly, Margaret Hunter argues: “Because race and gender can only be understood together, it follows that there must be a gender component to colorism itself. Light skin, in addition to being high status, is also regarded as more feminine, refined, or delicate” (Hunter 3). In a world where qualities such as beauty, femininity, and delicacy are often socially rewarded in women, these socially constructed standards of beauty ideals may have material stakes.

In the face of this epistemological context, Black feminist scholars such as Janell Hobson have argued for the specificity of Black women’s experiences as well as the potentiality for Black women to reclaim ownership of both their bodies and their understandings of beauty. Hobson argues Black women have historically been erased or othered (i.e., hypersexualized, made “grotesque”) within the landscape of beauty. For Hobson, Black women have by necessity carved out spaces to reclaim and recover “beauty” for themselves, such as in the films of Black director Julie Dash – of Daughters of the Dust (1991) acclaim. Black women consistently expanded and complicated ideas of beauty, by maintaining that women of color have a unique relationship to beauty, one that is shaped by more than blanket experiences of sexism and misogyny. Instead, specificity is necessary, because notions of beauty are defined and shaped by interlocking and intersecting systems of oppression.

The work of Maxine Leeds Craig argues that it is most helpful to understand Black women’s experiences through multiple standards of beauty, which are contextual, movable, and varied. She states:

I suggest that we look at beauty as a gendered, racialized, and contested symbolic resource. Since beauty is contested, at any given moment there will be multiple standards of beauty in circulation. By thinking about competing beauty standards and their uses by men and women in particular social locations, we can ask about the local power relations at work in discourses and practices of beauty and examine the penalties or pleasures they produce. (160)

Craig uses the term “negotiate” to demonstrate that at any given historical context, Black women navigate a complex set of expectations which may involve region, race, gender, class, political orientation, color, and more. As Craig pushes back against the idea of a singular, Eurocentric standard of beauty that Black women are measured up against, she and other beauty scholars of color continue the work of interrogating entrenched assumptions that have existed within beauty literature. Work such as Craig’s complicates a tendency of analysis on beauty to fall into binaries and dichotomies that mark the ways that beauty culture is either “good” or “bad” for women. Black women in particular find themselves uniquely situated within this landscape, as they may be situated in binaries that are uniquely raced, gendered, and classed. Black women navigate a complex landscape in terms of the ways their hair and beauty practices are politicized.

While many studies have considered this complex landscape, very little work has documented Black women participants in the contemporary natural hair community’s reflecting back on their childhood through the lens of beauty. The current study pulls together the context of the contemporary natural hair movement, as well as storytelling and memory, to reveal nuances of how Black women understand beauty in relationship to their childhood.

Studying Black Girlhood and Questions of Beauty

Black girls in particular have had their hair politicized in unique ways, and the navigating of these politics may be impactful in shaping their girlhood (Blake et al., “Beyond ‘Good Hair,’” Byrd and Tharps, Dove, Fasanella, Lattimore, Reese). bell hooks writes eloquently about the ways that hair and beauty rituals served as a space for shared experiences of Black girlhood, as a rite of passage into Black womanhood. She writes that braids were seminal in shaping her Black girlhood, while getting her hair straightened ushered her into Black womanhood. She states:

Before we reach the appropriate age we wear braids, plaits that are symbols of our innocence, our youth, our childhood. Then we are comforted by the parting hands that comb and braid, comforted by the intimacy and bliss. There is a deeper intimacy in the kitchen on Saturdays when hair is pressed. (“Straightening Our Hair” 112)

She also writes:

It was connected solely with rites of initiation into womanhood. To arrive at that point where one’s hair could be straightened was to move from being perceived as child (whose hair could be neatly combed and braided) to being almost a woman. It was this moment of transition my sisters and I longed for. Hair pressing was a ritual of black women’s culture of intimacy. (“Straightening Our Hair” 111)

As per hooks’s words, hair for Black girls can sometimes be a space of connection, intimacy, community, and comfort intra-racially. However, socially, Black girls’ hair and bodies may also be hyper-scrutinized and policed in specific ways, especially in school settings. Activists and Black feminist scholars have agitated on behalf of the dire needs of Black girls regarding their experiences with hyper-policing and schooling. Scholar Kristie Dotson reminds us “Black feminist theory, in general, has many aims. One of these aims to address the pervasive ignorance that exists around the lives, experiences, and plights of cis- and trans* Black women, girls, and gender-non-conforming people” (Dotson 49). The 2015 report “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected” by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Priscella Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda published by the African American Policy Forum reframes contemporary conversations around policing and education, by centering Black girls and young women, rather than Black boys and young men. According to this report, Black girls are six times as likely to be suspended from school than White girls, a ratio greater than Black boys to their White counterparts. Monique Morris’s 2015 book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools also attends to these issues. Not only are Black girls more likely to be suspended, but findings suggest that these suspensions are stratified by skin tone. When controlling for a number of factors, Blake et al. found that African American female adolescents with darker complexions were almost twice as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension as their White female peers – this finding was not found for African American female students with lighter skin complexions (Blake et al., “The Role of Colorism”).

Indeed, scholars such as Carter Andrews highlight the ways that Black girls are uniquely situated and oppressed within K-12 education. The ideological construction of White femininity as innocent, more ladylike, most beautiful, and an idealized form of femininity often operates to the detriment of Black girls in schools (Carter Andrews et al.). Black girls are more likely to be viewed as adults, and by being perceived as more adult-like in schools, Black girls experience disproportionate exclusionary discipline outcomes (Epstin et al.). Zero tolerance policies disproportionality affect girls of color (Blake et al., Hines-Datiri and Carter Andrews), and discipline practices and Black girls’ reason for discipline referrals differ significantly from White and Hispanic girls (Blake et al., “Unmasking the Inequitable Discipline”). Black girls’ bodies themselves have also been understood as more “dangerous” compared to their non-Black counterparts (Evans-Winters).

Relatedly, the policing of hair texture and hairstyling has been a site of tension for Black children, specifically Black girls, at schools. A 2017 NPR piece called “When Black Hair Violates the Dress Code” details the ways in which Black girls’ hair is often deemed “distracting” and in need of “fixing” by authority figures at schools. Teacher education scholar Dorinda Carter Andrews is quoted in the piece questioning these codes, asking: “What does a headdress have to do with learning and success?” (Lattimore). The piece reads: “Black girls are often seen as being loud or aggressive and are overly disciplined because of that stigma. Andrews finds that leads to low self-esteem and underperformance in school for these students” (Lattimore).

Incidentally, even celebrity Black girls have been unable to escape the hyper-scrutinizing and policing of their hair. Consider the case of Blue Ivy Carter, the daughter of superstar Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. In 2014, Beyoncé and husband Sean Carter were being criticized online for the appearance of Blue Ivy’s hair, which often stuck straight out of her head in an afro. The Knowles-Carters’ critics would have preferred that Blue’s hair was straightened, permed, smoothed down, plaited, or otherwise contained and made smaller. One woman went as far as to create a Change.org petition requesting that Blue Ivy’s parents “properly” comb her hair. While likely created as an unkind joke, the petition ultimately garnered over 5,000 signatures (Moss). As Sonita R. Moss argues, the moment revealed the unique nature of racialized sexism, and the ways in which even Beyoncé cannot escape the hyper-scrutiny and demonization of “bad Black mothers” that Black women have faced for many years.

While the aforementioned work unpacks the unique experiences of Black girlhood in relationship to embodiment and oppression, virtually no studies have documented how Black women as a product of the contemporary natural hair community recall and understand their Black girlhood through the lens of beauty. This article builds on conversation with the recent contributions to the field of Black girlhood studies, highlighting the nuances of how body and beauty politics are felt, recalled, and understood.

The Contemporary Natural Hair Movement

The term natural was first used within Black beauty culture in the 50s and 60s, to describe a short afro style. Today, to be “natural” or identify as part of the “natural hair movement” is uniquely situated in a new media, twenty-first century context. Beginning in the late 2000s, a critical mass of Black women in the United States created their own internet-based “natural hair movement” (Byrd and Tharps, Ellington, Ford, Gill, Lemieux, Muther, Phelps-Ward and Laura, “Rooted,” Saro-Wiwa). These women made the conscious decision to stop chemically straightening their hair via “relaxers” and “transition” into wearing their hair “natural,” without chemical processing or straightening. According to historian Tiffany Gill, hair “relaxers” [chemical hair straighteners] accounted for only 21% of Black haircare sales in 2013, a 26% decrease since 2011 (Gill). From 2008 to 2013, chemical hair relaxer sales decreased from $206 million to $152 million, and from 2008 to 2013, there was a steady growth in all Black hair care products except chemical relaxers (Muther). As Byrd and Tharps note, “Through this online community, a culture developed. It went by the Twitter handle #teamnatural and had its own vocabulary to describe styles and grooming techniques” (Byrd and Tharps 182).

For New York Times writer Zina Saro-Wiwa, “this movement is characterized by self-discovery and health” (Saro-Wiwa). For some Black women, the journey from chemically relaxed hair to natural styles can be incredibly powerful and emotional. I define the “natural hair movement” as an internet-based cultural moment (from about 2006 to the present) in which a critical mass of Black women actively has made the decision to stop chemically straightening their hair via “relaxers,” in favor of a variety of hair styles (extensions or not) that mimic or display a more kinky, curly, or “natural” hair texture (“Rooted”). I consider all of the corresponding blogs/bloggers, web tutorials, products and online product reviews, advice books, physical spaces (i.e., natural hair “meet-ups,” mixers, salons), Twitter accounts, Tumblr accounts, Facebook profiles, artwork, and spaces for “selfies” (self-portraits) to fall under the umbrella of this “natural hair movement.” I define “natural hair” as a woman of color’s hair that is un-straightened through either heat or chemical processing. When I discuss one’s “natural hair texture,” I am referring to kinky, coily, or curly un-straightened hair, most often growing straight from a woman of color’s head. I offer these definitions now for the sake of clarity, while recognizing that all the aforementioned terms are unstable, contested, and subjective – within both the internet sphere and communities more broadly.

Because the contemporary natural hair movement is a relatively recent phenomenon, there is still much to be gleaned from scholarship around its scope and impact on women of color’s use of social media and new media; understandings and representations of Black beauty; and Black women’s embodied experiences, memories, and negotiations of this terrain. My research, including the current research article, contributes to these developing conversations.

Black Feminist Epistemology and Storytelling

Drawing on Black feminist epistemology, this project also assumes that there is immense value in privileging the knowledges, voices, and experiences of Black women in these spaces as authorities and authors of their own hair and bodies (Bobo, Collins, Henderson). Black women’s knowledges make up the majority of what we know as the contemporary natural hair movement – their organizing of physical and online spaces, researching product ingredients and hair health, and their experimenting with styles and length. The research within the academy has been traditionally positioned as the “expert,” and many studies of beauty standards are often “top down” – focusing on ideals being sold through major locations of power such as images in popular magazine ads, national beauty pageants, or the appearance of runway models (Collins). However, this project prioritizes the narratives of Black women participants. I am interested in the ways they resist, critique, negotiate, and respond to beauty standards disseminated from these locations of power.

This prioritizing aligns with many Black feminist ways of thinking about knowledge production. As Patricia Hill Collins notes:

The suppression of Black women’s efforts for self-definition in traditional sites of knowledge production has led African-American women to use alternative sites such as music, literature, daily conversations, and everyday behavior as important locations for articulating the core themes of Black feminist consciousness. (Collins 202)

Natural hair-based spaces, and these women’s hair practices, are examples of “alternative sites of knowledge production” through “daily conversations” and “everyday behavior.” While not spaces free from conflict or oppression, spaces like these natural hair organizations provide alternative avenues for knowledge production where Black women can negotiate hair and body politics among themselves on their own terms.

In this article, I also consider the stories Black women tell about their girlhood through the lens of Black feminist storytelling. Storytelling is crucial for our understandings of Black women’s subjectivities, and it can serve as a tool for producing knowledge. Black feminist writers have considered the ways that narrative and storytelling do this kind of work. Alice Walker writes about the urgency of Black women’s stories. She states: “Through the years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories – like her life – must be recorded” (Walker 240). This idea of Black women’s stories as urgent, both in how they are spoken and how they are recorded, is important for understanding Black feminist storytelling. Walker also speaks to the communicative nature of Black women’s stories, as they are shared from Black woman to woman – in this case, from mother to daughter.

Quoting this passage from Walker, language scholar April Baker-Bell offers the concept of Black feminist–womanist storytelling that is relevant for understanding the exchange of narratives in this chapter. While Baker-Bell situates Black feminist–womanist storytelling by way of her own autoethnography, she offers a way of weaving together “the African American female language and literacy tradition,” “Black feminist/womanist theories,” and “storytelling” in order to “create an approach that provides Black women with a method for collecting our stories, writing our stories, analyzing our stories, and theorizing our stories at the same time as healing from them” (Baker-Bell 531). Black feminist and womanist theories offer a way of gathering, analyzing, and healing from Black women’s narratives specifically.

Black women have also mobilized storytelling about their experiences through language as a way to affirm their self-concept and dignity. As writer and novelist Paule Marshall notes, this kind of storytelling about experiences can serve as “therapy” among Black women, as she witnessed her mother and her mother’s friends exchanging tales through discourse. Marshall maintains that this exchange “restored them to a sense of themselves and reaffirmed their self-worth.” Specifically, Marshall notes that there is something cathartic about a good storytelling session. In the face of experiencing oppression, it can provide both a release of emotions, as well as an affirmation of ones experiences. Marshall says:

Through language they were able to overcome the humiliations of the workday. But more than therapy, that freewheeling, wide-ranging, exuberant talk functioned as an outlet for the tremendous creative energy they possessed. They were women in whom the need for self-expression was strong, and since language was the only vehicle readily available to them they made of it an art form that-in keeping with the African tradition in which art and life are one-was an integral part of their lives. … And their talk was a refuge. (Marshall 629)

While many studies have considered this complex landscape, very little work has documented Black women participants in the contemporary natural hair community’s reflecting back on their childhood through the lens of beauty. The current study pulls together the context of the contemporary natural hair movement, as well as storytelling and memory, to reveal nuances of how Black women understand beauty in relationship to their childhood.

Here, Marshall lays bare that Black women recounting stories among each other around their embodied experiences as Black women is useful in at least three ways. First, it provides an outlet to express oneself – both creatively through the art of linguistic Black oral tradition and emotively as a tool of catharsis. Second, storytelling of these experiences helps to affirm that they are “real” and valid. Finally, the storytelling provides a “refuge,” a space of comfort, safety, affirmation, and retreat. Within these discursive spaces, Black women can feel confident speaking their individualized truth, knowing there is a good chance that they may be understood, affirmed, and recognized.

As Robin M. Boylorn reminds us, Black feminist storytelling allows us to understand how Black women make sense of their lives. Boylorn’s work on the stories and narratives of rural Black women demonstrates how storytelling from a Black feminist perspective can serve as a tool for insight into the embodied lived experiences of Black women. Boylorn uses theories of “Black feminist thought,” “intersectionality,” “womanism,” and “muted group theory” to characterize the positioning and lived experiences of “Black women” (Boylorn 4–7). For Boylorn, Black women’s stories expand the ways that they are represented, by revealing the ways that they “cope and resist” with these forms of oppression. She notes: “The narratives I have shared acknowledge the nuances and complexities of rural black experiences. I sought to expand, not limit, the representations. I was committed to showing the women in my study as women with problems, not problemed women.” By gathering and sharing Black women’s stories, Boylorn aims for storytelling to shift from “problemed women” to “women with problems.” That is to say, while these rural Black women face problems that may sit at the intersections of various forms of oppression, these problems do not define and shape their entire being. Moreover, they actively “cope and resist” in this context.

Within the current study, in the case of Black women’s relationships to normative hair and beauty standards, their relationship to these systems as “problems” do not define and shape their entire beings. They actively negotiate, critique, cope with, and resist these systems. By understanding Black girlhood through the storytelling of various narratives, we can begin to understand the diverse ways that Black girls and women do this work. Their discourse and storytelling reveal the affective complexities within these narratives of coping and resistance.

Context

This study took place at a large university in the Midwestern US in Spring of 2016. The data were collected from focus groups. The pool of participants was gathered from the general membership body of a natural hair-based registered student organization called “CurlyGirls” (pseudonym) on a predominantly White campus. According to its constitution, one of the organization’s central missions is to “bring awareness to healthy hair care that is culturally diverse.” Organizations like CurlyGirls have developed on and off college campuses since the beginning of the natural hair movement in the late 2000s. The vast majority of CurlyGirls’ membership identify as Black women. Because I was interested in shared experiences among young Black women’s constructing of their childhood through storytelling, focus groups fit best for this work. The conversational, small group nature of the focus groups allowed the young women to speak freely among themselves – building on each other’s ideas and dialoguing through moments of dissimilarity.

From February to April of 2016, I conducted three monthly focus groups with five to eight members of the CurlyGirls organization. The same members repeatedly participated in the sessions, though every single member was unable to attend every single time (hence the five-to-eight-person range). A couple of students discontinued along the way; however, I maintained a core group of the same women. The active president of CurlyGirls announced my study via both an e-mail to the general body and an announcement to the general body during a meeting. In order to incentivize participation, participants who attended all three focus groups received a $10 gift card to Starbucks. Each session lasted an hour.

At the beginning of the first session, the participants completed consent forms, and at the end of the last session, they completed an exit survey. The three focus groups occurred directly after meetings of the larger CurlyGirls group. Each of the focus groups had a specific topic, and these topics were pulled from my previous work on representations within natural hair and negotiations of standards of beauty. In order to guide discussion, I used a combination of YouTube clips, questions, and images on PowerPoint slides.

Participants

At the time of study, all of the participants attended the same university. The majority of the students were undergraduates, while one student was a Master’s student. All of the participants were active members of CurlyGirls. With the exception of one participant, all of the participants self-reported falling within the age range of 18–21. Eighty percent of the participants who completed the exit survey hailed from the state’s largest and predominantly Black metropolis, which is about 80 miles away from the university’s campus.

Data Collection and Analysis

I conducted three focus groups with CurlyGirls. I audio recorded each focus group. I took notes during the focus groups, jotting down particular ideas that struck me as important, as well as noting participants’ nonverbal communication behaviors. The participants also completed brief written exit surveys after the final session. Taken together, the audio recordings, field notes, and exit surveys allowed me to capture a rich and layered account of the conversations.

I performed discourse analysis of the participants’ use of language and storytelling during the study. In order to best understand how the participants constructed their own childhood through stories, I analyzed the data in three phrases. I considered which comments speak to the major themes I was interested in within the context of Black girlhood, hair, and beauty politics – shared experiences, negotiation, and meaning making. Finally, I attempted to describe and interpret how the use of these stories might reveal something about Black women’s subjectivities.

Researcher Positionality

My then ongoing role as the graduate adviser for CurlyGirls presented me with a unique opportunity to serve as both researcher and insider throughout my focus groups. At the time of the focus groups, I had served as graduate adviser for the student organization for nearly a year. I had known four of the participants before the focus group and consider one of them a friend. Like all of the participants, I am also a Black woman. My familiarity with the young women afforded them a certain level of comfort with me, and this familiarity enabled me to analyze the given discourse in particular culturally specific ways.

Indeed, my relationships with the participants were not limited to only the roles of “researcher” and “participant,” so the line between my roles as a researcher and as a graduate adviser was a bit blurry, at times, as well. Green’s idea of “double dutch methodology” provided a way for me to think about my role as a researcher, as well as my relationship to my participants and my work. Green uses the analogy of “double dutch” to speak to the fluidity of these relationships – you find a certain rhythm and just go with whatever is being given to you. The fluidity and flexibility that inform double dutch methodology proved useful for my own focus groups.

Discourse Analysis

A discourse analysis allows researchers to examine what is both hidden and visible within communication, texts, or language (McDougal). According to Teun Avan Dijk, discourse analysis allows us to study texts, not just in their form and meaning, but also as complex social practices, structures, and hierarchies of interaction – existing within context, society, and culture (van Dijk). Moreover, this project also engages critical discourse analysis, in recognizing relationships between discourse and power with larger social structures (van Dijk). Discourse analysis involves a reading of texts, which takes into account power dynamics, social context, and the functionality of the given text. David Kirkland’s notion of “ethnography of discourse” is useful because it combines the methods of critical ethnography and discourse analysis in order to take seriously the context – particularly the cultural context – that the discourse exists within. Through ethnography of discourse, I understand that I am not simply analyzing the discourse itself, but the function and significance of the words within a larger, culturally specific context. This article assumes that discourses occur in a particular cultural context, which is critical in interpreting the meaning of the stories.

Future Directions

Future studies of Black women’s hair require us to expand our understandings of gender identity, gender expression, and queerness. I am interested in grappling with constructions of Black femininity and Black femme identity, considering how looking to these notions of gender expression may allow us to rethink hegemonic understandings of femininity and beauty. Across time and space, Black queer people – and Black queer femmes in particular – have forced us to question, grapple with, and subvert our understandings of what it means to be femme/feminine.

As scholars such as Spillers and bell hooks have argued, Black women have never been afforded full access into the categories of womanhood and femininity (“Ain’t I A Woman?”; Spillers). If femininity and beauty are defined by lighter skin, longer hair, thin bodies, and specific features, where does the absence of these phenotypical markers leave Black women? And how have Black queer and trans femmes sought to build and remake alternative understandings of what femininity is and can look like? If we accept that the current standards of femininity and beauty often exclude Black women (while also profiting from their likeness), what might it look like to build something new? The exploration of the intersections of hair and beauty politics, queerness, and transness could take us at least a few important places.

For example, Trans women have specific relationships to beauty and femininity that exist within a larger cisnormative society. Pointing to these kinds of spaces of possibility is beginning to mold more current understandings of how we can understand all Black women and femmes’ relationships to hair and beauty culture in a more nuanced way.

Concluding Thoughts

My work on Black women, standards of beauty, and articulations of natural hair has revealed to me the relevance of Black girlhood in how women understand their hair, their bodies, and beauty today. When Beyoncé Knowles-Carter sings in her 2016 Black feminist anthem “Formation,” “I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros/I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils,” the moment is not only a nod to and subversion of Black women’s specific experiencing of Eurocentric standards of beauty, but it is also a direct “clapback” at critics who lambasted Beyoncé for the appearance of her 4-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy’s hair.

Behind the headlines and mainstream narratives, what does it look like for Black girls to internalize, negotiate, critique, and resist normative beauty standards? Where does their learning around these constructions occur, and how do they think through them? This study’s goal is to begin to explore these questions. This study is vital connective tissue for Black/girlhood studies, beauty studies, and the study of hair politics – all in the context of the established contemporary natural hair movement.

Ultimately, I argue the “hair moments” revealed through these Black women’s storytelling of their Black girlhood reveal complex negotiations of normative standards of beauty and body politics. Led by theories of embodied Black feminist epistemology, I have analyzed three themes that emerge from these conversations: (1) shared experiences around play, imagination, and relationship to images of beauty; (2) family as a social unit that socializes Black girls around beauty; and (3) adolescence, prom, and contested notions of appropriate “formal” adornment. Each of these themes among the young women participants illustrate shared experiences, negotiation/critique, and meaning making around larger concepts of beauty.

I do not argue that these women share a monolithic experience or uniform understandings of hair and beauty politics. However, I do suggest that there is often overlap in their experiencing of beauty because, as Black feminist theory maintains, they actively negotiate and enact agency within interlocking systems of oppression. The analysis in this study demonstrates the potentiality at the intersection of Black feminism, beauty studies, and Black girls’ studies. Surely, some Black girls love their springy, thick curls. Of course, other Black girls look in the mirror and wish to have totally different hair. Still others – perhaps most – may oscillate through these two extremes from day to day, moment to moment. And still others are often completely ambivalent, and they do not care about their hair at all. Continuing to explore the diversity and multiplicity of young Black girls’ experiences may very well reveal the future(s) of Black beauty culture.