This last year has been a whirlwind. This spring I was awarded a fellowship with Docs in Progress to continue working on The Periscopic Gaze documentary. My book, Mediated Misogynoir continues to garner attention and I’m looking forward to more book talks in 2023. I am finally in rough assembly for the Rooted Collective documentary Damn Y’all Fine and I just sent a book proposal based on my dissertation. The book is entitled, Witnessing vs. Watching: Futurist Approaches to Consuming Black Pain. Keep an eye out for more!
In the News- Updates
New Book Available Now!
My book, Mediated Misogynoir: Erasing Black Women’s and Girls’ Innocence in the Public Imagination has been released as an ebook, and the hardcopy comes out from the publisher in July. It is now available for purchase and pre-order. Keep an eye out for a virtual book launch!
To be considered innocent is to be viewed as vulnerable to harm and worthy of protection from harm. An innocent person’s pain is recognized, acknowledged, and addressed. Mediated Misogynoir: Erasing Black Women’s and Girls’ Innocence in the Public Imagination interrogates contemporary media culture to illuminate the ways the intersections of anti-blackness and misogyny, i.e., misogynoir, converge to obscure public perceptions of Black women and girls as people with any claim to innocence. When pained images of Black female bodies appear on media devices, the socio-political responses are telling, not only in their lack of urgency but also in their inability to be read empathetically. By examining viral videos, memes, and recent film and television, Kalima Young makes a striking case for the need to create a new Black feminist media studies framework broad enough to hold the complexity and agency of Black women and girls in a digital age invested in framing them as inherently adulterated and impure.
Musings
Observation:
When I committed to doing a dissertation about Black trauma, I committed to also only participating in extracurricular projects that were about healing like The Rooted Collective and FORCE. I figured the trauma would be balanced by active work towards restoration.
After last night’s reclamation of the former Taney monument in Mt. Vernon, I feel what I always feel after public healing work — restored and refreshed with a little more empathetic juice in my cup- enough to dole out to those who need some extra woo.
Its great but the additional open heart comes with a tendency to see more things that are broken. The small and the large.
A parked car with a shattered headlight.
Broken glass in the street.
A woman’s cane held together with duct tape.
A tear in a girl’s stocking under her school uniform.
The weeds pushing through the sidewalk.
An overturned trash can.
Indents in the bus windows due to children punching them in frustration.
A glass is never half empty, nor is it half full, because air has mass.
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Long Musing on Black Time:
Been thinking about time a lot these days. It keeps coming up – in my classroom (teaching editing this week), in the books I read, in news articles, scholarly pieces and fun conversation. It’s all about time. In two weeks it will be one year since Prince died. In two weeks it will be 42 years since I popped out of my mama.
But time is a construct. And it is wildly arbitrary- especially because it is applied differently to different bodies.
People keep saying, “give Cheeto 45 time”…time for what? Time to continue fucking up? Why should I give this fool time? My time is precious. Black time is precious.
Black Time is precious cause it can be torturously slow – like Kalif Bower’s 300 days in solitary confinement.
Black Time is precious cause it occurs in a heartbeat – like those 30 seconds between looking at the sails of the slave ship and choosing in that heartbeat to throwing yourself overboard.
Black Time is precious cause it can be chock full of activities – traveling on two buses to get across time to walk 30 minutes to get to your third job.
Black Time is precious because it can feel torturous – sitting in a meeting as a thousand tiny blades render your flesh but you must remain quiet and professional throughout.
Black Time is precious because Black time on this earth can be fleeting – just ask Philando, Alton, Walter, Eric, Tamir, Trayvon, Rekia, Sandra, Freddie and all those whose did not have time to mount a defense against.
Black Time is precious because it doesn’t travel in a straight line of progress – its only been 53 years since the U.S. outlawed discrimination against Black people but our mortality rates, income inequity and incarceration rates have skyrocketed, curved, crashed, folded back on themselves, straightened out and crashed again.
Black Time is precious because my mother died at 63 and I have friends’ whose parents are just beginning to pass away at 80-90 years old. How’d they get all that extra time? Oh, that’s not extra time – that’s privileged time and it doesn’t belong to me.
When someone Black declares, “I ain’t got time for that” – they mean it.
Our time is precious. Our time is complicated.
And fucks who want me to die in this country will not get one more second of my precious….time.
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Musings on my dissertation:
So, received my IRB waiver this week and I have begun cataloging my viral videos. I decided to watch one or two even though I said I would not engage and begin analyzing my sources until winter break.
I couldn’t help it. I had to press play.
And again, I watched Eric Garner die. And again, I watched Philando bleed out. And again, I watched Marlene Pinnock beaten on a highway. And again, I listened to bystander speculation. And again, I thought about the frame – what happens before capture –what shifts upon capture – what noises contribute to the experience. What is visual trauma? What is witnessing?
And as I watched, I felt the strange, disconcerting tingle that is my intellectual brain in conversation with my broken heart. #dissertation #reflexivity#humaneinsightorspectacle?
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Musings on the results of the 2016 Presidential Election:
Its not good enough to survive. Folks need to thrive and thriving will only come through resistance. So please, please, let us resist. Locally, nationally, interpersonally.
Resist. Resist shame. Resist fear. Resist forced acquiescence. Resist having your critiques silenced. Resist the urge to settle.
Silent suffering is still suffering. So don’t be silent.
Check out other musings on Medium.
Kalima Young 