“Dreams are not for people who look like you” : The social construction of Black girlhood in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn

Abstract

This thesis examines the social construction of Black girlhood in the novel Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson (2016). It focuses on analysing the main character’s coming-of-age experience, viewing Black girlhood as a site on which multiple systems of oppression intersect. The analysis is executed utilizing two theoretical approaches: intersectional feminism and social constructionism. The thesis is thus based upon two premises – firstly, that womanhood is shaped by multiple systems of power and is thus not a unified experience for all women, and secondly, that these systems of power uphold controlling images of Black womanhood through socially constructed knowledge. The thesis posits that controlling and at times contradicting social expectations restrict August’s agency and formation of a positive self-image. The relationship between August and her three friends is seen as a space in which a culture of resistance against Black girls’ treatment as the ‘other’ is cultivated. Through processes of re-socialization, August finds ways to deconstruct and be liberated from essentialist notions of ‘true womanhood’. Another Brooklyn thus succeeds in demonstrating the ways Black girlhood is socially constructed through externally defined, oppressive controlling images. However, Black girlhood and womanhood are also portrayed as sites for finding positive self-definitions and resisting systematic devaluation.