How Black Caribbean Girls Dis-Miss: Dawgs, Karens and Foul-Mouths Do Battle Online

Abstract

The following case study interrogates verbal duelling as peer-group consolidation and identity construction, among adolescent Afro-Trinidadian female interlocutors in a WhatsApp group, at St Favour’s High School. We have maintained British orthography to be true to our and the participants’ identities and have kept the original spelling of the conversational texts. By analysing the interaction order in conversation as ethnomethodology and conversational analysis among 12 participants, ages 12 to 13, and 16 to 17, we uncovered the power dynamics and elements of the carnivalesque in their communication. Subjects enacted female gender identities by emulating urban gang culture, resisting surveillance, and denouncing middle-class gentrifying behaviours, which they associated with being obedient “girl guides”. Consequently, they wielded transmodal resources in online communication, adopted hypermasculine speech styles, engaged in exaggerated swearing, and anti-queering gender positionalities as resources for equipping themselves with creative comebacks. Their linguistic behaviours challenge conservative understandings about verbal play and gendered discourse among school-aged adolescent girls and add value to the study of power and gender performance among non-White cisgender youth at a prestigious school. The performativity of gender-crossing reifies Africana womanism and aligns their ideologies with the class struggles of the working and lower-middle classes in urban communities in Trinidad.