Beauty Politics and Poetic Analysis: Embodied Empowerment through Poetry

• In Event: 30464 - Speculations

Abstract

Black women and girls navigate various beauty inequalities and violences. In response to these challenges, they deploy embodied strategies of empowerment and resistance. This paper explores the meaning-making of a Black girl-woman named Nia – a 19-year-old college student in the United States. Specifically, I consider her embodied praxis in response to beauty discrimination. The purpose of this project is to examine Black women and girls’ understandings of their relationships to beauty, hair, and makeup in practice and in discourse. To do so, I push the boundaries of sociology through the incorporation of poetic analysis, I-poems, and the Listening Guide methodologies to capture the depth of meaning behind their words during semi-structured interviews. These approaches to doing sociology make visible the interiority of beauty and render Nia’s embodied experience visceral for the reader.

Author

• Brittney Miles, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign