Black Queer Girlhood on the Musical Theatre Stage

Black Queer Girlhood on the Musical Theatre Stage offers a new perspective on the creativity of contemporary Black women musical theatre artists, their representations of Black girlhood, and the Black queer feminist spectators who engage with their work. Creating a new model for Black queer feminist praxis, La Donna L. Forsgren engages with musical theatre scholarship, Black queer feminist criticism, reception studies, Black girlhood studies, and film and television studies, critiquing the gaps and silences within these fields. Each chapter uses Black queer feminist criticism and audience reception theories of popular culture to understand what meaning and pleasure Black queer spectators find in popular musical performances created by Black women. Through resistant readings of twenty contemporary musical theatre productions--from Broadway hits such as The Color Purple and the televised broadcast of The Wiz Live! to the less studied but popular gospel musical Mama, I Want to Sing!--Forsgren demonstrates how the intersections of Black women's identity foster their ability to (at times) subvert and disrupt heterocentrism, sexism, and white cultural hegemony within the modes of theatre production. In so doing, Black Queer Girlhood on the Musical Theatre Stage positions Black women's artistic work as a crucial component of politically engaged popular entertainment and renders Black queer feminist spectators visible.