Girlhood Unscripted: A Homeless Black Girl's Video Narratives and the New Terrain of Representation

The article examines impromptu video narratives produced by a Black 9-year-old girl Kiara during the video-making sessions at the shelter for homeless families in Columbia, South Carolina. I argue that these video narratives create a new discourse of girlhood that ruptures existing media, popular culture, and other societal scripts about girlhood and disenfranchised communities-a discourse of girlhood unscripted-which brings into play the complex intersections of class, ethnicity, race, and gender and produces a new realm of representation. Drawing on her daily experiences of poverty, hunger, violence, incarceration, and racism, Kiara's narratives also pose a challenge to the field of girlhood studies which continues to focus on White, middle-class femininity thereby creating a scholarly trap of representation.