Black Gurl Reliable: Pedagogies of Vulnerability and Transgression

by Dominique C. Hill

Overview

Black Gurl Reliable does the original work of curating Black girls’ and women’s experiences and experiential knowledge, indexing sociocultural tactics (schooling) that foreclose Black girl aliveness, while advancing embodiment as a key ingredient of Black mattering. Elevating Black Girlhood Studies as an ethos, narratives presented offer redress to inequities and hauntings of race-gender structures of dominance and position Black girls and girlhood as more than lamentation and what happens to the body. Hill solicits the strength and utility of arts-based methods in capturing identity, performance, and experimental design for ephemerality and improvisation. Hill makes clear Black feminism’s insistence that knowledge and possibility are produced through the body.

As a means of mitigating the deleterious effects of schooling on Black girls’ and women’s bodies and making legible the insights and knowledge produced from schooling experiences, Hill introduces the concept of Transgressngroove. This living feminist practice explores the relationships between Black girlhood, education, and the body, as researched for over a decade through workshops, consulting, classrooms, personal development, and other teaching/learning spaces.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826507594
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2025
Series:	Black Lives and Liberation
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Dominique C. Hill is an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Colgate University. She is the co-author with Durell M. Callier of Who Look at Me?! Shifting the Gaze of Education through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Storying Black Girls Reliably: Black Feminism, Groove[ing], and the Self
1. “Sing a Black Girl’s Song”: A Code for Black Girlhood Studies
2. Reverse Osmosis to Awaken Flesh: An Experiment in Undressing
3. my Hair, my Mirror, my Own: A Lesson in (Self) Recognition
4. Willful Touch: An Experiment in Body-Activation
5. Teaching Black Girlhood: A Lesson in Cultivating Rigor
Conclusion: Gifts of Being with Black Girlhood
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

In the intersections of a body scholarship and the soul of a personal journey, Dr. Dominique Hill illustrates new insights concerning Black Girlhood and Black Womn's Studies. Here-poetry, dance, the gifts of 'knowing,' and memory become the urgent and embodied inspiration Black Gurl Reliable. This is a book of distinction and a long-awaited addition to the canon of Feminist and Gender Studies, Performance Studies, Black Studies, Pedagogical Theory, and exercises in liberation.”
—DaMaris B. Hill, author of Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood

“In the intersections of a body scholarship and the soul of a personal journey, Dr. Dominique Hill illustrates new insights concerning Black Girlhood and Black Womn's Studies. Here in this book, poetry, dance, the gifts of 'knowing,' and memory become the urgent and embodied inspiration Black Gurl Reliable. This is a book of distinction and a long-awaited addition to the canon of Feminist and Gender Studies, Performance Studies, Black Studies, Pedagogical Theory, and exercises in liberation.”
—DaMaris B. Hill, author of Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood

From the Publisher