‘It’s High School. Everybody gone judge yuh’: school as a social world where Afro-Caribbean girlhood experiences are created

ABSTRACT

School operates as a space/place where girls must navigate and negotiate different aspects of their identities further adding to the complexities of Black girlhood. The scantiness of sociological scholarship surrounding Black girls from the Dutch West Indies elucidates this article’s importance. I conducted audio- and video-recorded interviews with nine Afro-Caribbean girls ages 14–17 years old. The interviews were interpreted using an Afro-Caribbean transnational feminist framework which specifically centres the lives of the girls. Findings reveal that Afro-Caribbean girls navigate school by negotiating their decisions about their hair, appearance, and dress to resist heteronormative ideas in Sint Maarten. This paper is a part of a larger project where I examined how Afro-Caribbean girls from the island of Sint Maarten conceptualise what it means to be a girl and to understand how they narrate, navigate, and negotiate their girlhood experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Afro-Caribbean
• appearance
• school
• black girlhood
• Dutch West Indies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ocqua Gerlyn Murrell

Ocqua Gerlyn Murrell is a doctoral student in sociology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She has a master’s degree in sociology with a certificate in women’s and gender studies. Her master's thesis focused on Afro-Caribbean girlhood in the Dutch West Indies. Her dissertation research is an extension of her master’s thesis which focuses on the complexities of the transitional period between girlhood and woman/adulthood in the Dutch West Indies. Ocqua is interested in sex education, sex work, feminisms, Black girlhood, gender and sexuality, and reproductive justice. Her work aims to give volume and visibility to the stories of Black women and girls and LGBTQ+ folx in the west and from the global south.