Meet Me in Outer Space

In a world fraught with physical, emotional, and academic violence steeped in racism and sexism directed towards girls and women of color, we believe there is no better time to build theories that center, honor, and uplift the ingenious critical multimodal literacies of girls of color. Importantly, we acknowledge that schools—and school-based spaces of literacy learning in particular—have seldom been places of refuge for girls of color, as they often work to contain, silence, and eradicate their multiple and brilliant literacies (Brown, 2013). However, like their foremothers, girls of color have historically and contemporarily built their own spaces—often outside of the classroom—that both honor their identities and allow them to take up creative, resistant, and disruptive acts of literacy (Muhammad, 2012; Ohito, 2020). In this chapter, we draw on the work of scholar activists who, through their work with girls of color seek to build, sustain, and protect spaces where girls of color can safely and collectively employ their multimodal literacies as they evoke joy, practice celebration, and (re)imagine possibilities for their futures (Griffin & Turner, 2023; Toliver, 2022; Turner & Griffin, 2020). Specifically, we take up notions of fugitivity (Player et al., 2020), outerspace (Coles & Kingsley, 2021) and youthtopias (Coles, 2021), geospatiality (Butler, 2018), hush harbors (Kynard, 2010), and homeplace (hooks, 1990; Player et al., 2022) to theorize the space-making practices girls of color employ in order to create arts-based literate renderings. Employing a critical multimodal analysis framework (Griffin, 2020), we first examine the ways their creations work to resist and disrupt violent gendered (Collins, 1991) and White supremacist (mis)representations of their personhood in the extant literature (Player et al., 2022). We then draw on that same literature to construct a framework for the active creation and sustenance of joyful fugitive spaces. To represent our implications for this chapter, we include a multimodal piece of art that serves as one example of depiction of the joyful fugitive spaces created by girls of color. We highlight the symbols within the artwork and briefly discuss how it can serve as a guide for educators interested in working with girls of color as co-conspirators in the construction of liberating and celebratory spaces of literacy learning.