The voices of black women have traditionally been excluded from rhetorical scholarship, both as a subject of study and as a methodological approach. Despite the little attention black feminist thought has received, black women have long been articulating the unique intersection of oppressions they face and have been developing critical epistemologies.This study analyzes the National Press Club address given by NOW President Eleanor Smeal utilizing a black feminist methodological approach. The study constructs a black feminist theory for the communication discipline and applies it to a discursive artifact from the women's liberation movement. The implications of the study include the introduction of a new methodological approach to the communication discipline that can expand the liberatory reach of its scholarship.

Dana, the Black female protagonist in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred (1979), finds herself literally and figuratively in medias res as she sporadically travels between her present day life in 1976 and her ancestral plantation of 1815 – two time periods that represent two converse concepts of her identity as a Black woman. As a result, her time travel experiences cause her to revise her racial and gendered identity from a historically fragmented Black woman, who defines herself solely on her contemporary experiences, to a Black woman who defines herself based on her present life and her personal and ancestral history of experiencing and overcoming racial and gendered oppression. Using Black feminist theory scholarship, this thesis examines Dana’s movement out of in medias res, through temporal double-consciousness, into a historically integrated identity or interstitial consciousness.

Searching for the Womanist Within is a play about self identity and the daily experience of African-American women who are at the intersecting oppressions of race, gender and class. The unique life perspective of Afeican-American women is explored through the retelling of stories from the writer’s life as well as the lives of other black women. In Feminist, Black Feminist, Afrocentric and Womanist drama it is common to steer away from conventional theatrical structures, Solo drama, a less conventional structure, was selected for this play. In addition to the play is an essay about the writing process, as well as a literature review and a statement of significance about this creative thesis.

I am baffled each time someone asks me, “Who is Jessie Fauset?” As I delved into critical work written on Fauset, I found her critics dismissed her work because they read them as bad fairytales that showcase the lives of middle-class Blacks. I respectfully disagree. It is true that her novels concentrate on the Black middle-class; they also focus on the realities of Black women, at a time when they were branching out of their homes and starting careers, not out of financial necessity but arising from their desire for working. They establish the start of what Patricia Hill Collins later coined “Black feminism” through strong female characters that refuse to be defined by society. This thesis seeks to add Jessie Fauset to the canon of Black feminists by using Collins’ theories on Black feminism to analyze Fauset’s first two novels, There Is Confusion and Plum Bun.

Uterine Fibroids, medically termed uterine leiomyoma, are benign tumors of smooth muscle cells that grow in the uterus. While they are the most common pelvic neoplasm in women and fewer than 1 percent of fibroids develop into cancer, uterine fibroids can cause infertility, adverse pregnancy outcomes, and greatly affect one’s quality of life. Black women have been disproportionately affected by fibroids; when compared to white women, Black women are: 2-3 times more likely to have fibroids, diagnosed at a younger age, more likely to have 7 or more fibroids, more likely to have more severe and more troublesome symptoms (anemia, severe pelvic pain, constipation, and stomach aches), and have twice as many hysterectomies due to fibroids. Black women’s disproportionate affliction with uterine fibroids is particularly concerning given the historical medical injustices associated with Black women’s bodies and reproductive rights from slavery to present day. By placing Black women at the center of analysis and using a Black feminist epistemological framework, this study aims to make a unique contribution to medical sociology as well as literature on the theoretical and practical management of sickness and wellness among Black women in the United States. Using qualitative interviews and grounded theory methodology, the study examined how Black women frame the condition of having uterine fibroids. Specifically, the study investigated a) how Black women conceptualize having fibroids, b) how Black women’s conceptualizations of fibroids affect their feelings about selves or their lifestyles, c) the mechanisms, if any, by which Black women deal with uterine fibroids, d) how their multiple race, class, and gender identities affect their illness experiences and types of treatment that they seek, and e) how conventional and complementary/alternative medicine shapes Black women’s experiences with fibroids. Conceptualizations about fibroids are rooted in the race-gendered histories of Black women and the unique stressors that they face. Through interactions with doctors and among peers, Black women resist the unbearable burden of uterine fibroids through various coping strategies, but generally “keep it moving”. They avoid invasive surgeries through patient agency by being advocates for their medical treatment, self-researching, dialoguing with others, and directing doctor-patient interactions.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Khalilah Doss, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Educational Administration and Higher Education, presented on March 30th 2016, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: READY, SET, GO: A NARRATIVE STUDY ON JAMAICAN FEMALE TRACK AND FIELD ATHLETES WHO ATTENDED COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY IN THE U.S. MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Saran Donahoo At most institutions, track and field can function as the redheaded stepchild of athletic programs because these sports do not draw the revenue nor get the crowds often associated with college football or basketball. Nevertheless, there are multiple correlations common among all college student athletes. Primarily, all student athletes face the pressure of having both academic and athletic responsibilities and obligations. Concurrently, there are also differences that can make these athletes experiences unique, such as being from a different country or being of minority status (by gender, sexual orientation or color) and attending a predominately white institution. As a former college athlete, I want to identify and determine how Jamaican Female Track and Field Athletes negotiate the social, academic and cultural environments that they were a part of while attending a college or university in the U.S. I believe that some [if not all] of these female athletes struggle academically, socially, and personally while attending postsecondary institutions in the U.S.

Due to the participatory nature of social media platforms, users contribute to the narratives built around online action for social change and shape the discourse on societal topics through their participation. At the same time as social media has become a space for societal activism and participation facilitating connective action of individuals, social media platforms are ultimately, for most, owned by private companies. This makes them products of the attention economy, where the attention of consumers has been quantified and commodified and where different players compete for such attention. The current research presents an analysis of content related to online advocacy to inform on the effects of a social media platform on social change and the use of a platform by citizens. More specifically, the research focuses on collective identity building through visual self-representation and how the commercial structures of the platform and the participation of users affect the representation of women in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement on Instagram. Methodologically the research was performed through a quali-quantitative exploration of publications associated to the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, using cultural analytics and content analysis. The research concludes that while the complexity of technological and human variables in online societal participation makes the research on representations of women challenging because of the various actors and forces at play affecting it directly or indirectly, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter is largely used for collective identity building that can contribute to empowering marginalized groups on social media. This type of finding nevertheless emphasizes the memetic characteristic of the hashtag rather than a tool for direct social activism.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / There is a dearth of literature about post-secondary transition experiences of Black women with dis/abilities (BWD). In this qualitative study, I explore transition experiences of five post-secondary BWD from high school to college in order to privilege her chronicles and narratives as knowledge. In addition, two urban public high school transition coordinators (TC) participated in the study. Three inquiries guided my dissertation: (1) features of educational experiences narrated by BWD, (2) features of transition services provided to students with dis/abilities, including roles of and approaches as described by the TCs, and (3) how BWD narratives may be leveraged to critique and extend transition services as the TCs described them. I engaged in three semi-structured interviews with six of the seven participants (one interview with the seventh). I drew from Disability Studies/Disability Studies in Education (DSE), Critical Race Theory, and Womanist/Black Feminist Theory and their shared tenets of voice and counternarratives and concepts of social construction and falsification of consciousness to analyze the narratives of BWD participants. I drew from the DS/DSE tenet of interlocking systems of oppression, DisCrit tenet three, race and ability, and constructs of Inputs and Outcomes in work on Modeling Transition Education to analyze the TCs’ narratives and in connection to the narratives of the BWD. Across both sets of participants, three themes in the form of Truths emerged; they were terrible and sticky experiences of racial/dis/ability oppression for the BWDs and, imposing of whiteness and normalization within the transition education practices described by the TCs. For the BWD, those terrible and sticky truths took three forms: (a) Pathologization; (b) Disablement; and (c) Exclusion. Another type of truth in the BWD’s narratives, however, was Subverted Truths: (re)defined identities and radical love, (re)placed competence and knowledge, and (revalued sisterhood and community, the ways of pushing back and resisting the Truths and their effects. I discuss implications for BWD post-secondary transition-planning-and-programming theory, research, policy, practice, praxis, and spirituality.

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