Self-Making and Consumed Image: Theoretical Meditations on the Failures, Triumphs, and Complications of Black Womanhood

• In Event: Pray You Catch Me: Dreaming Possibilities for Freedom Through Critical Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, and Pedagogies

Abstract

The proliferation of social media has allowed for the global consumption of the Black woman’s image by spectators with access to a digital screen. Thus, social media functions as a digital space with competing ideologies and aesthetics that enables participants to self-curate their personalized digital representations. Black women’s embodied aesthetics on display for social media have political foundations that enable them to claim agency against normative gazes. Social media is a technology for young Black women to see themselves, witness others seeing them, and participate in digital self-making. A crucial tenet of Black feminism is to value standpoint epistemology (Collins, 2000). Standpoint epistemology requires that we center and amplify the knowledge Black women have access to from their lived, embodied experiences. As a critical and creative Black Feminist scholar, I utilize interdisciplinarity and art to theorize about Black women’s self-making on social media in an effort to interrogate the material world (Smith, 2017). My methodology begins with a visual analysis of a prominent Black woman cultural producer on social media, in addition to social media analytics and qualitative interviews. My methodology is concluded with an autoethnographic creative component in the form of performative monologues (Jones, 2017).

This paper is a theoretical meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and Black women’s personhood. Through a performance and visual-culture lens, my engagement in the close reading of former video vixen and thriving social media entrepreneur, Blac Chyna, revealed that she is part of a continuum of Black women cultural producers who participate in the exchange of visual access to their bodies for capitalistic gain. As a cultural producer, she performs hypersexuality and achieves material gain through the media economy facilitated by social media. Discursively, she is seen as a beneficiary of stereotypes, yet she is also an example of an empowered businesswoman. Blac Chyna is a cultural producer that deserves an academic treatment because her use of social media generates dissonance between the politics of failure that surround the discourse of Black womanhood in the US and embodied agency through “objecthood” (McMillan, 2016).

Utilizing Dr. Nicole Fleetwood’s theorization on Black women’s bodies as deviant in the visual field and Dr. Jack Halberstam’s argument of social failure as subversion against hegemony, I seek to advance Dr. LaMonda Stallings work on the possibilities of agency within failure for Black women (Fleetwood, Halberstam, and Stallings, 2011). Focusing on Blac Chyna’s cultural productions as evidence of this theorization, I bridged creative expression and critical interrogation of texts to arrive at insights about Black women’s identity constructions. This creative exploration provides further insight on where to locate the many narratives of Black womanhood and girlhood in the physical realm. As the number of social media users grows to 3 billion, and as young Black women increasingly shape digital discourses (e.g. #Blacktwitter), there is an urgency for educators to understand social media and the competing ideologies that influence young Black women’s epistemologies (Gordon, 2017).

Author

• Mysia Anderson, Brown University