A Public lecture by Dr. J. T. Roane

Surviving and confronting quotidian forms of domestic domination within their households, families, and communities including sexual violation, troubling their families’ strivings and workings-within and around hegemonic breadwinner ideology, and enacting fugitive relations that challenged the confinement and discipline that extended between their homes, schools and other sites of disciplinary authority--including the Pennypack House, the Youth Study Center, and the state reformatory school system--Black girls in mid-twentieth century Philadelphia challenged the nascent biopolitical order from below, articulating the fleeting horizon of a Black girl commons—a formulation of resistance to property, enclosure, and containment, addressing the unique experiences of Black femme youth inhabiting an impossible position within mid-twentieth century urban life as neither future breadwinners nor future “wives.” These girls experienced and challenged homes, schools, and carceral facilities as sites of violent expropriation, violation, and containment, and their actions, though not recoverable in any comprehensive sense, point towards a vision for the city outside property and its cognate, the proper.