This article explores firesetting and its legal manifestation, arson, as a crucial link between girlhood, carcerality, and rage. Beginning with the North Carolina Samarcand Arson Trial of 1931, when twelve girls were charged with the capital offense of arson for burning down the Samarcand Manor State Home and Industrial Training School for Girls, an institution that incarcerated white girls during the Jim Crow era, I read historical examples of girls who set fires. In doing so, I consider firesetting as a strategy of political resistance to girls’ physical incarceration as well as what I see as the carcerality of girlhood. Additionally, I examine representations of firesetting girls from literature and film to consider how so-called match-strikers translate their rage into the calculated political act of arson as a form of anticarceral resistance to the category of girlhood itself. While I argue that the acts of firesetting are performances of anticarceral rage, representations of these “arson girls” perpetuate the suspended category of girlhood as a limiting prison of subjective boundaries enmeshed with white supremacy and class discrimination.

中文翻译：

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纵火女孩、火柴人和起火者：对愤怒、种族化和少女时代的刻板印象

本文探讨了纵火及其法律表现形式，纵火，作为少女、监禁和愤怒之间的重要联系。从 1931 年的北卡罗来纳州萨马尔坎德纵火案审判开始，当时 12 名女孩因烧毁萨马尔坎德庄园州立家庭和女子工业培训学校而被指控犯有纵火罪，这是一个在吉姆克劳时代监禁白人女孩的机构，我阅读历史上放火的女孩的例子。在这样做的过程中，我认为放火是一种政治抵制女孩肉体监禁的策略，也是我所认为的少女时代的监禁。此外，我从文学和电影中研究了点燃女孩的表现，以考虑所谓的火柴人如何将他们的愤怒转化为纵火的蓄意政治行为，作为对少女时代本身的一种反癌症抵抗形式。虽然我认为放火行为是反监禁愤怒的表现，但这些“纵火女孩”的表现使少女时代的悬置类别永久化，作为与白人至上和阶级歧视纠缠在一起的主观界限的限制监狱。