Women's Studies Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2809

Browse

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Feelin Feminism: Black Women's Art as Feminist Thought
(2014) Judd, Bettina A.; Barkley Brown, Elsa; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation contends that the systems of racism, (hetero)sexism, and classism are felt in the body, mind, and spirit and that resistance to these systems must be felt as well. Feelin, a term rooted in U.S. Black culture and derived from Black speech (as in "I'm feelin that!"), is deployed as a way of knowing through which Black women engage and create life-affirming art. I argue for understanding black women's creative production as a site of Black feminist thought, one that continuously negotiates, shares and acknowledges emotion as a form of knowledge that, in Audre Lorde's terms, galvanizes radical thought into "more tangible action." In this project I negotiate these issues through close reading and analysis of the work of three artists: photographer Renee Cox, poet Lucille Clifton, musician Avery*Sunshine. In Cox's photography I examine the ways in which she re-imagines racial shaming and Black motherhood through her own body and mothering practice as represented in her work. Through Clifton's words, poetry, and spiritual and creative practice, I trace a theology of joy. And, I analyze expressions of sacro-sexual ecstasy in Avery*Sunshine's genre ambivalent music. These themes of shame, joy, and ecstasy are prominent not only in the work itself, but also in the artists' experiences of creating that work and in the artists' discussions of their work and worldview. Feminist scholarship and affect theory frame my engagements with feelings and emotions as knowledge. Finally, I propose a methodology for engaging Black women's knowledge production that mandates that we take Black women's anger seriously and interrogate from there. This project practices the modes of knowledge production that it presents. Furthering its argument that Black women's art is a site of feminist knowledge production, research is conducted and presented through poetry, mixed media, and personal narrative in addition to academic research methods and prose.
Food on the Move: Gendered Representation, Cultural Sustainability, and Culinary Practices of Gullah Women
(2015) White, Katie M.; Bolles, Augusta Lynn; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Food on the Move: Gendered Representation, Cultural Sustainability, and Culinary Practices of Gullah Women connects Gullah women and foodways with processes of migration, cultural heritage, sustainability, and memory. Drawing on women’s studies, history, anthropology, literature, film, and food studies, this interdisciplinary project looks at the preparation and presentation of food as an integral part of a sustained Gullah culture. Using Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust alongside contemporary imaginaries of the senses, the work discusses how movement of peoples into and out of the Sea Islands of South Carolina complicates the relationship between the sensory, particularly taste, memory and home. Most importantly, through food-centered stories combined with analyses of cookbooks and other culinary notations, this dissertation examines the vital role women have played in maintaining Gullah culinary history and the dissemination and sustenance of Gullah culture. It enhances not only our understanding of Gullah culture but also of the processes of social and cultural changes necessary to sustain it. This work argues that the Gullah Geechee National Heritage Corridor is a critical site for cultural sustainability particularly in regard to food. Food becomes a site for mapping the traditions, pressures, changes, adaptations, and resistances within a particular racial-ethnic community as it encounters dominant cultures, as well as a site of creativity, pleasure, and survival.
Stylin' BlaQueer Feminisms: The Politics of Queer Black Women's Fashion Activism
(2018) Blake, Donnesha Alexandra; Bolles, Augusta L; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Stylin’ BlaQueer Feminisms contributes to conversations about the political function of fashion by exploring the ways that queer Black women define activism with fashion and how their practices advance Black feminism. In this study, I aim to define fashion activism, to examine how queer Black women engage in fashion activism in digital and physical spaces, and to outline core themes in their fashion activism. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences prove that fashion is political by using fashion, style, and dress as vehicles to study subject formation, nonverbal communication, and activism. While there are studies about the political nature of fashion that center Black women of various gender and sexual identities, few examine how contemporary Black lesbian and queer women leverage fashion in digital media and cultural institutions to engage in resistance and knowledge production; much less have those studies connected their fashion activism to core themes in Black feminism. I employ mix methods to investigate the practices and performances in six fashion activist projects produced by queer Black women. These methods include visual and discourse analyses of the style blogs; She’s A Gent, A Dapper Chick, and She Does Him Fashion, and season one of the YouTube web series The Androgynous Model; event analyses of two public LGBTQ+ fashion shows Rainbow Fashion Week (RFW) and dapperQ Presents: iD; and interviews with the creators of RFW and The Androgynous Model. In performing a comparative analysis of these projects, I found that intention aside, the practices and performances in these projects signal Black feminist politics such as the centering of marginal identities, self-definition, using the body to signal and subvert controlling images, and coalition building between freedom-making struggles. I call this praxis, BlaQueer Style. Through their articulations of BlaQueer Style, Black lesbian and queer women illustrate that fashion activism is not only the work they do to subvert rigid gender and sexual codes in the existing fashion industry, but it is the labor marginalized communities undertake to leverage fashion, style, or dress to affirm their intersecting identities, build community, and resist oppressive structures in society.
WHEN SURVIVING IS ILLEGAL: BLACK WOMEN AND THE ENTRAPMENT OF U.S. INCARCERATION AND WELFARE
(2021) Hoagland, Tangere L; Rowley, Michelle V; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The institutions of welfare and incarceration are central in poverty governance. My dissertation builds on the work of scholars who deem the relationship between these two systems to work in a coordinated effort through discourse, policy, and practice under a penal-welfare regime. My research considers the following questions: (1) What realities and vulnerabilities does a contemporary understanding of this regime produce for Black women (2) What kinds of violence do Black women become vulnerable to under this current landscape? (3) How are Black women navigating daily vulnerabilities that lead to or perpetuate their risk of state-sponsored entrapment? This research finds that the state uses the penal-welfare regime to script Black women for erasure by creating conditions of suffering and punishing those who attempt to survive. However, Black women create and locate resources that simultaneously aid in their survival and help them resist the ways the state renders them disposable. My project examines poverty governance to re-think state-sponsored violence against Black women—on both macro- and micro-levels. I explore oppressive systems, the barriers they create, and individual responses to them. My project begins at the macro level with a review of shifts in US welfare policies and prison reform—specifically the 1996 welfare-to-workfare shift and the skyrocketing rates of female incarceration—to understand the vulnerabilities these shifts created for Black working-class women. It then moves to legal case-study analyses of Black women accused of welfare fraud and arrests made in welfare offices to understand how the two distinct systems operate co-dependently. I conducted life-history interviews with twenty Black single mothers currently using welfare or formerly incarcerated. These participants, from Prince George’s County, Maryland, illuminate vulnerabilities experienced in the wealthiest African American county in the nation. Focusing on Black women in this county emphasizes the production of class fluidity within this terrain as participants with middle-class backgrounds—who believe themselves exceptional—found themselves unexpectedly navigating poverty. Overall, my research illuminates the disposability of U.S. Black women whose experiences can be described as a slow death once they are entrapped by the penal-welfare regime, but it also emphasizes their multifaceted tools of survival.