“It’s About Us” Using Popular Theatre for Engaging Racialized Minority Girls in Exploring Questions of Identity and Belonging Jo-Anne Lee & Sandrina De Finney

This article reflects on the use of popular theatre to investigate racialized minority girls’ lived experiences and processes of identity formation in a predominantly white urban Canadian city
(Victoria, BC). The chapter draws implications for using popular theatre to investigate girls’ daily
experiences of exclusion and belonging. We challenged traditional identity models that
conceptualize identity categories such as ‘gender’ and ‘race’, as inherent, fixed and unidimensional.
Instead, we employed theoretical concepts of intersectionality and transnational
feminism to understand girls’ complex and multiple identities.

The article provides practical and theoretical observations to assist practitioners, researchers and policy-makers who wish to engage expressive and theatre-based methods to better understand girls’ hidden and silenced processes of identity formation.