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Abstract
Black girls are being penalized in school and society, largely for subjective reasons. Harsh, unrestrained, and microagressive subjectivities towards Black girls are linked to the view that Black girls are viewed as more adult-like than their peers (Epstein, Blake, & Gonzalez, 2017). In schools, the trend of adultification persists in resulting in harsher penalties and punishments of Black girls without consideration for their modes of literacy (Cooper, 2019; Pough, 2004; Morris 2016; 2019). Feminine hip hop dance (a range of hip dance exclusive of breakdancing) is one of those modes of literacy that is policed and scrutinized largely due to the politics of respectability. Under a hip hop feminist framework, this multiple case study examines encounters with the politics of respectability due to hip hop dance in the lives of three Black girls in grades 3, 7, and 11. Hip hop feminism seeks to understand how Black women and girls operate within a hip hop culture, or more simply put, live their hip hop lives. To gain this understanding, it is imperative that the experiences and perspectives of the hip hop participants are centered, instead of the perspectives and assumptions of passive observers. Multiple case studies demand a contextual inquiry of the phenomenon being researched (Yin, 2014). Therefore, inquiry into how this dance form existed as sociocultural literacy served as a secondary research goal. The primary reasons the girls gave for dancing is because it is fun. This affirmation of childhood joy is in sharp contrast to the assumptions of sexualization attributed by observers of Black girls dancing. Case study participants danced in such frequency and abundance that demarcations of when the dances stopped and started overlapped and proved to be permeable. Implications for this study include acceptance and therefore pedagogical strategizing of feminine hip hop dance as literacy in the classroom, a restructured orientation of how dancing by school-aged Black girls is perceived, and expanded research into the social, literacy, and digital aspects of feminine hip hop dance.