Naming Breonna Taylor: Revitalizing Black Women’s Memory in Digital Spaces and Urban Landscapes

Abstract

This dissertation, Naming Breonna Taylor: Revitalizing Black Women’s Memory in Digital Spaces and Urban Landscapes, interrogates the multilayered practice of remembrance, where the convergence of historical and cultural memories cultivate an active, participatory process that keeps Breonna Taylor’s memory alive and forever-evolving. Each chapter examines acts of remembrance dedicated to Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who police officers fatally shot in Louisville during a narcotics investigation on March 13, 2020. Naming Breonna Taylor demonstrates how the racialized and gendered acts of naming Taylor, both in digital spaces and urban landscapes, elevate her to a household name and make her a representative figure for broader issues related to Black womanhood. I construct a Black feminist memory framework (BFMF) to provide an analytical approach that examines the multilayered naming practices for Taylor by various groups, each with different ideological commitments regarding how she is remembered. This framework explores how memory is constructed, made visible, and operates differently when informed by Black feminist scholarship, ideologies, and methodologies. BFMF shapes how researchers collect and analyze acts of remembrance by offering adaptable methods and applying theories to these texts.

The guiding research questions for this dissertation are: How does a Black feminist memory framework illuminate how Breonna Taylor is remembered and memorialized across digital platforms and urban landscapes by Black communities and other stakeholders? To what extent does this framework reveal the tensions between life and death, pleasure and pain, joy and resistance, healing and trauma, and celebration and mourning? To render Black feminist memory as a framework, this dissertation navigates through three case studies between 2020 and 2023 that are associated with the Say Her Name movement. The first chapter examines the #BirthdayForBreonna campaign in 2020 on the social media platforms Twitter and TikTok. This chapter theorizes memory activism to understand how communities remember and honor Black women’s pasts in online spaces. Drawing from Black birthdays and homegoing traditions, I demonstrate how these racial-historical contexts resurface in digital spaces in ways that function rhetorically to sustain the continuity of Black resistance and celebration. The second chapter analyzes the virtual reality exhibit Breonna’s Garden. This virtual garden is a moderated immersive experience on the platform AltspaceVR where participants, represented as avatars, could explore five exhibits dedicated to Taylor. I argue that the cultural production of Breonna’s Garden—through its design, cultural narratives, interactivity, and meaning-making—exemplifies Black technonostalgia. The gardening practices within are rooted in Black homegoing traditions where developers use garden simulations to honor the deceased and engage users in the process of healing and regeneration. The third case study examines eight mural artworks depicting Taylor through the critical lens of Black feminist placemaking. I analyze my experiences visiting each mural through rhetorical field methods and the ArcGIS StoryMap I created titled, The Breonna Taylor Mural Memorial Project. I argue that the physical placement of murals portraying Taylor offers alternative geographies of liberation while resisting the dominant understandings of blackness and womanhood.