Qrescent Mason

This article concerns itself with the ways that Black women have taken up #BlackGirlMagic as a critical reimagining of their subject positionalities as Black women. I argue that #BlackGirlMagic is a resistant imaginary that has significantly altered the contemporary western social imaginary and suggest that the intersectional ambiguity that Black women animate builds community among Black women toward collective liberation. Bringing together Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, Simone de Beauvoir's concept of ambiguity, and María Lugones's concept of oppressed←→resisting subjects, I argue that #BlackGirlMagic's so-called “magic” is both produced by and produces what José Medina has termed a guerrilla epistemology. In outlining the contours of this epistemology, I demonstrate how #BlackGirlMagic resists through the transmission of knowledge, the creation of a critical genealogy, its visionary orientation, and the development of an insurrectionary counterdiscourse. To illustrate, I briefly discuss how #BlackGirlMagic provides white women with an opportunity for a beneficial form of epistemic friction. In the end, I suggest that #BlackGirlMagic's ability to unite Black women transnationally bodes well for its continued effects on the western social imaginary.

This essay presents the interwoven phenomenological reflections of three feminist women, situated across various intersections of difference, whose plans to conduct research on Black feminism and ambiguity were affected by the coronavirus and the social climate resulting from widespread responses to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States during the summer of 2020. The authors offer an experimental, juxtaposed intersubjective phenomenology of research, located in the critical phenomenological framework of intersectional ambiguity. The reflections include reconsiderations of the utility of research and its (inter)subjective dimensions. Each writer captures how differences in their sociopolitical identity and positioning affected their ability to conduct “research” during a summer of unrest and unease. Taken in sum, these reflections argue that critical phenomenology provides many opportunities for reflecting upon lived experience and the relevance of intellectual labor and knowledge-production to the sociopolitical challenges we face.