News/Research

Lashon Daley at the National Women's Studies Association Conference 2017

03 Dec, 2017

Lashon Daley at the National Women's Studies Association Conference 2017

Lashon Daley, a PhD scholar in performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley, attended the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Annual Conference: 40 YEARS AFTER COMBAHEE: Feminist Scholars and Activists Engage the Movement for Black Lives in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference took place from November 16-19, in which Daley was a presenter.

The Spring 2017 BCNM Conference Grant helped cover Daley's costs of attending a premiere conference in her field.

In her own words:

As a part of a collective of Black women in graduate school at the UC Berkeley studying the affects of Blackness + girlness in order to deconstruct transnational imaginings of Black girlhood, I, along with my colleagues, welcomed to the world our multidisciplinary theoretical framework entitled "Black/Girlhood Imaginary" (BGI) at the National Women's Studies Association 2017 conference. Birthed out of “intersectionality,” BGI prioritizes the experiences of young Black girls as we employ performativity, temporality, and positionality to interrogate Black girlhood as a social phenomenon. Accordingly, we trace Black girlhood through the imaginary in order to deconstruct and go beyond the fixed perceptions of Black girls.

As a Performance Studies scholar with a Designated Emphasis in New Media, I centered my analytic of BGI on Judy Winslow, the 13-year old daughter of Carl and Harriette Winslow from the 1990's sitcom, Family Matters. I investigate how Judy's sudden disappearance from the Winslow household speaks to the national phenomenon of how young Black girls across the United States are also pushed out of their family homes.