Description:

In neoliberal, post-feminist culture, Angela McRobbie asserts, “young women… are the privileged subjects of social change”--whether white girls in the Global North or girls as a target of development policy in the Global South. Meanwhile in US educational policy, Kimberlé Crenshaw reports, Black girls are “pushed out, overpoliced, and under-protected.” This lecture looks at the fit between current ideologies of girlhood and young black female embodiment primarily through a reading of the recent independent film The Fits (Anne Rose Holmer, 2016). Toni, an 11-year old tomboy, joins a Cleveland community dance team whose members soon become afflicted by mysterious seizures. Mass psychogenic illness overlaps with the onset of adolescence to shift disciplinary regimes of race and gender. Filmed on location in collaboration with the Q-Kidz dance team and its founder, The Fits tells its story through movement, gesture, and sound, building a cinematic space of “communicable” experience.