Journal - Week 9 by Wanyi Wang https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s Aria Halliday - Twerk sumn! en-us 2021-04-06 23:22:16 UTC 2025-11-06 15:01:19 UTC hello@padlet.com Week 9: Aria Halliday - Twerk sumn! wanyiwang114 https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1393885329 1) What does Aria Halliday argue in her article, “Twerk sumn!”?
2) How does her discussion reframe hegemonic (often both racist and sexist) representations of black girlhood?
]]> 2021-04-08 01:13:45 UTC https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1393885329 1) What does Aria Halliday argue in her article, “Twerk sumn!”? wanyiwang114 https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1401682984 From "Twerk sumn!", it discusses the historical, cultural, and fun significance of twerk dance, and how it has been appropriated and sexualized by white media; while when black girls facing different negative statements about their twerking, They use their own methods to demonstrate what twerking means to them as an expression of liberation and happiness. The author argues that Black girls' use of twerking videos to celebrate and challenge each other's self-expression allows them to enjoy their bodies, regain the possibilities of pleasure in blackness and girlhood, and fight with profanity.]]> 2021-04-09 22:32:58 UTC https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1401682984 2) How does her discussion reframe hegemonic (often both racist and sexist) representations of black girlhood? wanyiwang114 https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1401683321 The article introduces how black girls are oppressed by media under hegemonic pop culture. "The ways Black girls are demonized relies heavily on how their bodies, their skin complexions, and their class position are perceived by others. These oppressive interpretations hinder the ways that Black girls can connect and find pleasure with each other" (Halliday, 2020, p.877). For example, twerk definition further characterizes the dance as a lewd movement tied specifically to sexual provocation and thrusting. Also, black girls have been de-centred in twerking discourse for 3 reasons: misogyny directly related to being Black; Black women’s own self-censured approach to sexualized forms of bodily expression in the public sphere; white women contemporary appropriation (i.e. Miley Cyrus declaring that she invented twerking) (Halliday, 2020). However, black girls also did something to reframe hegemonic representations of black girlhood. First, black girls redefine the behaviour of twerking to them by uploading the twerking videos on Vine, Instagram, etc. to share cultural knowledge of self and others online. In those videos, "black girls dancing together, encouraging each other, complimenting each other’s movement, laughing, and celebrating successful new moves" (Halliday, 2020, p.880). By doing this and inviting the white supremacist gaze to enact visibility of themselves, the movement of the hips in ways that were not inherently sexual in black culture, and "disrupt popularized white supremacist characterizations of Black female bodies and situates the Black female body as an acceptable and celebratory site of pleasure"(Halliday, 2020, p.884). Therefore, as Halliday demonstrates in the article, "black girl ways of knowing lead Black girls and women to a collective freedom that dismantles racist paradigms and misogynist dogma" (Halliday, 2020, p.878)]]> 2021-04-09 22:33:14 UTC https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1401683321 References wanyiwang114 https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1401693208 Halliday, A. S. (2020). Twerk sumn!: theorizing Black girl epistemology in the body. Cultural Studies (London, England), 34(6), 874–891. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2020.1714688]]> 2021-04-09 22:41:20 UTC https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1401693208 wanyiwang114 https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1401894818 2021-04-10 01:59:29 UTC https://padlet.com/wanyiwang114/kdbg86p4z57i1w5s/wish/1401894818