Monstrous Others: Black Girl Refusal in Afrofuturist Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Following a debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former Vice President Mike Pence, then President Donald Trump appeared on Fox News to give his reaction statement: “This monster that was onstage with Mike Pence, who destroyed her last night, by the way, but this monster . . . I thought that wasn’t even a contest last night. She was terrible. I don’t think you could get worse . . . And totally unlikable” (Summers, par. 2). Although the use of these descriptors are negative in their own right, Summers also noted that Trump “previously reserved the term ‘monster’ for terrorists, murder[ers] and major natural disasters” (par. 1). In this way, Trump attempted to dehumanize and diminish Vice President Harris, a strategy historically based in the continuous global stereotype of Black women and girls as monstrous Other. According to Muhammad and McArthur, the ‘“double jeopardy’ of being both Black and female in society has continued to create and reinforce a U.S. culture satiated with derogatory representations of Black women and girls” (134). These representations include stereotypes like the Mammy, a desexualized woman so loyal to whiteness that she cares more for her masters than she does for herself and her family; the Sapphire, a loud, rude, malicious, overbearing, and angry woman; and the Jezebel, a hypersexual, innately promiscuous, and sexually deviant woman (Harris 4–6; West 288). Each of these stereotypes positions Black women and girls as Other, a being who is “a threat and a danger” (de Beauvior 88) to those in dominant society. Although the above stereotypes are often associated with Black women, they also influence the lives of Black girls. In fact, numerous scholars have argued that society’s perception of Black girls is distorted by clichéd depictions that create harmful restrictions on and blatant misrepresentations of Black girls’ identities (Muhammad and Haddix 301; Sealey-Ruiz 291; Toliver, “Breaking Binaries” 6). In a survey study of 325 adults from various racial and ethnic backgrounds, Epstein and colleagues found that, compared to white girls of the same age, Black girls are inaccurately described as knowing more about adult topics and sex and therefore need less nurturing,