ABSTRACT
In the Western world, Black and Brown girlhood is typically approached through frames of deficit and vulnerability related to their gender, race, and class, which are inseparable from the arguably dangerous and dysfunctional spaces they often inhabit. Two recent French films, Divines (Benyamina 2016) and Girlhood (Sciamma 2014), challenge such narrow understandings of the spatiality of girlhood through the stories of teenage girls of African descent who navigate everyday life in the marginalized, isolated, and heavily stigmatized periphery of Paris. I argue that the films provide cinematic counter-cartographies of Black and Brown girlhood in French banlieues by: (1) locating the banlieue within relational space; (2) navigating the violence and suffering that comes with the racism, misogyny, poverty, and social exclusion embedded in the banlieue; and (3) charting what might be interpreted as “fugitive spaces” for self-knowledge, self-love, and healing through friendship. The latter emphasizes the importance of refusing what is and disengaging with oppressive structures, at least temporarily. I conclude with a discussion of how such practices of refusal and disengagement relate to the political notion of resistance as different forms of place-based responses to oppression and suffering.
