When Play Turns Lethal: Digital Mediation and Recuperating the (After)lives of Black Girls

Abstract

“When Play Turns Lethal: Digital Mediation and Recuperating the (After)lives of Black Girls,” studies the lives of three black girls murdered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: Tyisha Miller, Sakia Gunn, and Kenneka Jenkins. Countering African American historians’ propensity to define black girls’ existence through a framework of violence in the archive, I argue that a focus on their daily lives can generate paradigms of justice-seeking that value black girls’ lives and honor them as historical figures. I analyze digital archives, media accounts, and oral history interviews to show how digital media representation and black political movements mounted on their behalf, ironically, flatten their life narratives, agency, and personhood. Through my work, I center narratives of black girls dictated by their life stories instead of fitting them into traditional narratives of resistance or survival. I use Marisa Fuentes’ method of reading along the bias grain to reconstruct Black girls’ life stories and resist the reification of these stories into evidence of violence that can be used to support struggles for social justice. This project challenges utopian ideologies that see technology as a transformative, justice-oriented tool that benefits marginalized people. Instead, having observed black counterpublic discussions within the digital sphere, I show how the infrastructure of digital technologies can distort the aims of social movements by reducing black girls to a form of technology. While black users are aware of some of the shortcomings of technology (“digital divide,” encoded bias, etc.), they often believe in technology’s potential to provide answers, solve problems, and to empower the “powerless” through platform creation. By analyzing the discursive and representational politics at play embedded in the algorithms, networks and code within various media, I show how black internet users work to confront the power dynamics that obscure black girls’ histories while also identifying the intra-racial sexual violence girls encounter. Additionally, I show that navigating the complex calculus of representation within the media complicates grief for some mourners.