Pariah: Pariah follows its protagonist, Alike, as she navigates processes of identity-making and belonging through personal and familial relationships.

Thompson: Though Western imagery persistently frames the black female body as simple stereotypes, the contemporary artists of Black Womanhood undermine, reconstruct and decolonize these categorizations.

Taylor: Taylor recounts documenta 11: a 2002 contemporary art show in Kassel, Germany that asserted a ‘global,’ multinational awareness.

Pariah is at once a familiar narrative and a decidedly progressive approach to the coming of age of a young woman. In the protagonist’s attempts to navigate relationships—be they familial, romantic or platonic—she reveals the raw ways in which individuals struggle to define their own conceptions of self, identity and belonging. This self-fashioning is a persistent theme of the film as Alike confronts a series of trying experiences, from rejection and complicated emotions to violent responses to her sexuality by her mother. Throughout the film, several figures use specific terminologies that incite specific stereotypes of sexuality (eg. AG, etc.) and serve as archetypes of sorts to Alike. Such monikers, in addition to the other terms used throughout the film, remind me of Thompson’s analysis of Western stereotypes and the process by which contemporary artists undermine these simplified categories to subvert and redefine the image of the female body. As exemplified by Maria Campos-Pons, the effect of such redefinition is the recolonzation and reinstitution of agency to the black female body. As noted by Thompson, the “body accepts and rejects, maintains and transforms, deconstructs and reconstructs blackness, femininity, and sexuality—based on her own terms rather than those imposed upon her.” (306) This beautiful summation is also incredibly relevant to Pariah in its negotiation and navigation of stereotypes and identity, raising the question how stereotypes alter our own perceptions of self. How do stereotypes—perpetuated by language, imagery, etc.—affect our own senses of belonging in society? How do we embrace, negate or subvert these monikers?