Gisabel Leonardo

Through narrative, stand-up comedy, street art, and theory Melenas Malcriadas: The Black Aesthetics of Hair and Dominicanidad examines hair as a means of resistance in the contemporary Dominican Republic and the US Dominican diaspora. By reading hair as a dominant motif of Dominican cultural production, this project draws on Black feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies to articulate how Black and Afro-descendant women “talk back” to authority through a notably femme and Black aesthetic. Accordingly, this project proposes new methodologies by which to engage such themes to think alongside aesthetics of hair and acts of haircare as meaning-bearing tools of self-expression and actualization through a malcriada sensibility that centers Black mother- and daughterhood. The theoretical framework and case studies in this project underscore matrilineal relationships in contemporary Dominican literary and cultural production to offer a feminist intervention in readings about sexual, gendered, and racial forms of deviancy. This project contributes to current scholarship by examining modes of Black feminist resistance and representation in Dominican cultural production. Critical Black feminist theory is grossly underdeveloped in Latin American and U.S. Latinx Studies. As such, at stake with this project is the development of transdisciplinary paradigms that dialogue between fields of study to engage with Black intellectual production in literary and cultural studies. Some of my preliminary questions in this project are: How do Black and Afro-descendant Dominican women use hair as a tool of resistance? What role does maternity and haircare play in the negotiation and rejection of expressions of Blackness? And lastly, how do these women actively assert their deviancy as a form of protest that reimagines dominicanidad?