Over the past decade, concepts and expressions derived from Black feminist theory, a line of intellectual thought historically produced from Black women’s unique lived experiences that asks us to consider how one’s material realities are co-constituted by multiple, interlocking systems of the oppressed, have traveled into the public sphere through popular media. These theorizations, especially the term ‘intersectionality’ have increasingly been translated to mass audiences through popular media such as news, television, and music to much scrutiny and debate. While these popular usages can expose mass audiences to the lived realities of Black women, femme, and queer folks in productive ways for thinking about liberation, the neoliberal, individualist impulses of popular media markets often demands a shift in the structural analysis of marginalization that Black feminism intends to offer, leading to problematic moments of misunderstandings and misuse. It is this tension between the history of Black feminist theorizing and neoliberal capitalism that I explore in “Black Feminism In Popular Culture: Exploring Representations of Black Feminism in News & Entertainment Media.” Employing Halls’ (1980) model of encoding and decoding, I examine news platforms, television shows, and visual albums that center representations of Black women, femmes, and queer people, to ask: 1) What are the varying social, economic, and technological conditions across popular culture spaces that have allowed for an influx and proliferation of black feminist concepts, politics, and aesthetics? 2) How do various forms of popular media construct Black feminist messages? 3)What messages about Black feminism do audiences decode through these media texts? And 4) What do these encoding and decoding processes say about how Black feminism circulates throughout contemporary popular cultures, and 5) what material and ideological conditions are at stake in these circulated meanings? Broadly, “Black Feminism In Popular Culture” aims to map the possibilities and limitations of communications technologies for spreading and perpetuating liberatory rhetorics, such as Black feminism. In other words, can liberatory ideologies of marginalized communities truly be transmitted through media and technologies that were not only designed within the logic of neoliberal capitalism and mainstream, hegemonic ideology but also historically used against them? To answer these questions, I employ a range of qualitative research methods, including in-depth semi-structured interviews with media creators and practitioners, digital participant-observation within media organizations, close readings of media text, discourse analysis of popular press and trade publications, and qualitative audience response survey. Together, this range of qualitative investigations explores the complex ways messages about Black feminism are embedded and transmitted through popular media; and, on a more material level, can be used to influence the experiences of women and queer people of color in the world. Ultimately, I argue popular Black feminism can offer a useful and accessible framework for combating pervasive discourses of anti-racist misogyny in popular media. However, in reformulating these messages to conform to the strictures of neoliberal markets, these messages are often presented in ambiguous ways that can be easily missed by those who choose to dismiss them. As such, audience readings of popular Black feminism are often rooted in the positionality of the audience member themself, with Black women, femme, and queer audiences seeking out this media and seeing its liberatory potential. Thus, while for some popular Black feminism becomes another tool towards liberation, for others, it may be consumed purely for pleasure with little liberatory potentialities. This project adds to the growing literature at the intersection of Black feminist theory and media and technology studies that seek to understand how historically marginalized communities have used new media and digital technologies to promote counterhegemonic and liberatory discourse.

Creator

• Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea Aida

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-jtzf-2b18

Subject

• Communication

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16018
• etdadmin_upload_898858

Keyword

• News
• Audiences
• Entertainment
• Popular Culture
• Black feminism

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright