A Feminist Exploration of Black, Latina, and Afro-Latina Girls' and Gender-expansive Youths' Sociopolitical Development: How Integrating Black and Latina Feminist Epistemologies Expands Our Understanding of these Girls' Navigation of Gendered Racism

To address gaps in psychological literature regarding Black, Latina, and Afro-Latina girls’ and gender-expansive youths’ sociopolitical development, my dissertation integrates Black and Latina feminisms to explore how these girls navigate and resist systemic (gendered) racism. My dissertation is a collection of three studies that explored under-examined and culturally relevant forms of resistance, including Black, Latina, and Afro-Latina girls and gender expansive youths’ solidarity, political imagination, radical hope and community activism. I designed and implemented a multimethod project, the Hope Resilience and Action Study, where I collected cross-sectional survey data from 315 Black and Latina girls and gender-expansive youth in the Southeastern United States. Quantitative data captured their experiences of gendered racism, identity and socialization processes, and critical action. Additionally, I used plática methodology - a culturally relevant, Latina feminist approach to qualitative inquiry – to co-create theory with 25 Black, Latina, and Afro-Latina girls and gender-expansive youth across the United States. Through informal conversations, youth discussed aspects of their identity, and socialization experiences, as well as their reflections and responses to the sociopolitical events of 2020.
In paper 1, I integrated borderlands and sociopolitical development theory to qualitatively explore Black, Latina, Afro-Latina girls and gender-expansive youths’ reflections on intra and interracial solidarity during the heightened racial violence of 2020 across different contexts. I employed plática methodology to discuss the factors that promoted and hindered youths’ solidarity processes in school based cultural affinity spaces, community organizations, and social media. Using a modified version of RADaR methodology, I found that community organizations were sites for political education that promoted interracial solidarity. School-based cultural affinity groups promoted intraracial solidarity for some girls as friends provided a sounding board for making meaning of sociopolitical events; other girls felt disconnected from more privileged intraracial peers who perpetuated discrimination. Social media created a context for heightened BLM participation that was not necessarily intentional, causing skepticism about interracial allyship from Black girls. The absence of centralized organizing for immigrant rights hindered girls' and gender-expansive youths' solidarity for Black and Latinx migrants. These findings highlight the need for youth to have opportunities across different contexts for political education and reflexivity to strengthen and sustain their sociopolitical engagement. Considering misalignments between co-creators’ critiques of allies and their own allyship, more research is needed that explores what effective allyship looks like in different contexts.
In paper 2, I expand sociopolitical development theory (Watts et al., 2003) by exploring the role of political imagination (Scott et al., 2023) and radical hope (Christens et al., 2018; Mosley et al., 2020) in supporting Black, Latina, and Afro-Latina girls’ commitment to social change. Using intersectional, reflexive thematic analysis, I found that Black and Latina girls’ and gender-expansive youths’ whose visions for the future incorporated both political imagination and radical hope, more explicitly articulated their commitment to social change. On an individual level, co-creators described future plans to serve their community through their careers, philanthropy, and mutual aid. On a collective level, co-creators described the importance of interracial solidarity and intersectionality as tools for coalition building. Co-creators whose visions for the future did not incorporate radical hopes tended to focus exclusively on their reflections of discriminatory experiences, and anticipated workplace gendered-racism. I discuss specific ways that political imagination can be used to support youths’ sociopolitical development and learning in contexts like their school. Further, I describe how policy makers and activists can incorporate insights from these girls’ and gender-expansive youths’ political imaginings and radical hopes into their advocacy.
In paper 3, I integrate intersectionality and the integrative model of ethnic-racial identity and critical consciousness development (Mathews et al., 2020) to explore how familial racial socialization informed the relationship between gendered racism and community activism among Black and Latina girls and gender-expansive youth. I found that girls who experienced stereotypes of being angry more often and received more familial racial socialization, engaged in more community activism; contrarily, girls who received less racial socialization engaged in less activism. Findings from this study emphasize the importance of intentional gendered-racial socialization that supports Black and Latina girls in understanding the systemic gendered-racism as well as engaging in risk assessments for their critical action. I also emphasize the need for proactively advocating for policy level changes that directly change gendered-racist policies that pose barriers to these girls’ healthy development.
My dissertation documents, explores, and amplifies Black, Latina, and Afro-Latina girls’ and gender-expansive youths’ navigation of gendered racism to 1) learn how they may already be resisting gendered-racism, 2) identify barriers to their resistance of gendered-racism, and 3) propose potential supports for navigating gendered racism. Findings from this work will be foundational to the development of interventions that support Black, Latina, and Afro-Latina girls’ and gender-expansive youths’ radical healing from gendered racism, while simultaneously advocating for policy change that addresses the systemic causes of their marginalization.