When thinking specifically of transnationalism, African diaspora and the fluidity of identity: Where do we locate Afro-Latina women? The answer for this question would seem to come from a Black or Chicano feminist thought, nonetheless, these theoretical frameworks have static spaces where fluid subjectivities like that of Afro-Latina women are not recognized. This report frames a theoretical conversation between these two frameworks through a dialectic discussion of their empty spaces or limits and proposes a new approach to Afro-Latina feminism based on the processes and intersections of Black consciousness, sexuality, and the knowledges that are created through the body and its fluidity. More importantly, paying close attention to the roles of translocation, transformation, and the fluidity of identity. In furthering this theoretical conversation, under the theme of Afro-Latina women, this report takes on the case of Dominican women’s transnational experiences and their different dimensions as represented in novels like, Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and Ana Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt. Looking specifically at the relationships between women and women, and women and their bodies as being transformed through the sacred, this report concludes that the centrality of Afro-Latina women’s experience is in recognizing that the body as an archive, is a place from where knowledges are re-created and disseminated creating a feminist epistemology for themselves. / text

Homicide deaths are a common reality in Brazil. Every year, approximately 50,000 people die from this violent crime. Between January 2009 and February 2010, 7,936 people were killed just on the state of Rio de Janeiro. Of this amount, 1,185 were committed by the police, not including the number of disappeared people in this state, came up to 6,379. This report seeks to address the political and analytical challenges of understanding and redressing the negative impacts of state policies and everyday practices, especially violence, on Black Brazilians, particularly disadvantaged Black women, through a revision of relevant scholarship. I first draw attention to three distinct approaches of violence of the state of Rio de Janeiro, and on Black people’s resistance practice. Second, I connect Rio de Janeiro’s practices of state violence with contemporary and historical experiences of racial terror in the African Diaspora through policing Black youth and Black communities, imprisonment, and violence against Black women. And finally, I theorize on the relevance of my work to Black feminism, African Diaspora, and activist theories addressing the politics of fieldwork and the impact of the research on that experience. The knowledge apprehended through this report contributes to my own and further research on state violence against Black people in Brazil and throughout the African Diaspora. / text

Feminism in the early 1980's in the United States revolved much around social and cultural matters such as sexual liberation, self- definition and self- realization for women. Derived from these ideas within feminism comes Alice Walker's Womanism, that is the writer's own definition of the strong and independent woman of color. This paper investigates the character Shug Avery, in The ColorPurple (1983), in relation to feminism and Womanism. It is argued that she is an empowered female because of the characteristics and attributes that come along with being a Womanist, despite moral,cultural and societal conditions that indicate marginalization for Shug and all women.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / While much has been written about the work of school counselors in urban schools, there remains a void of information about the unique experiences of Black female school counselors, particularly in relation to their work with Black adolescent girls in the urban middle school space. This qualitative study seeks to illuminate these experiences via the contributions of four Black female school counselors who have worked in this capacity serving Black girls. Three points of inquiry or Research Questions served as guideposts for this study: (1) What are the personal and professional experiences of Black female school counselors in their work with Black adolescent girls in urban middle schools?, (2) What are Black female school counselors’ perspectives on the ways in which they are supported or not supported in working with Black adolescent girls? and, (3) In what ways (if any) does the concept of “mothering” show up in the relationships and counseling practices involving Black female school counselors and Black adolescent girls in urban middle schools? Thus far, it appears that Black women’s voices and perspectives have been devalued and ignored in research relating to school counseling. To adequately represent the perspectives and experiences of Black women as a marginalized group, I employed a critical hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, along with a Black feminist framework. I engaged the participants in two semi-structured interviews, along with asking them to construct a reflective vision board, serving as a mosaic of their lifeworlds as school counselors working with Black adolescent girls. These actions, along with a review of literature on the schooling experiences of Black adolescent girls in urban schools enabled me to acquire data leading to seven overarching themes relating to the following: relationships and connections based on culture and conversation, the need for support from decision-makers on programming, the physical and emotional investment in the work, mentoring, and the marginalization of Black women in school spaces. Lastly, I present conclusions and implications for school systems, school administrators, and professional school counselor organizations to aid in establishing effective practices in serving Black female students and enhancing the overall school counseling profession.

As renowned scholar and researcher Sara Ahmed (2004; 2015) reminds us, emotions do things to us because they are relational. This dissertation takes aim at one emotion in particular: shame. By recognizing the similarities between us - that we all feel some degree of shame - we nonetheless inevitably arrive back at our differences: Not all feminists are bombarded with shame equally or in the same way. With a particular emphasis on the ways that shame can obstruct interpersonal relationships within the feminist movement, in this dissertation, I pay close attention to the complexly suppressed shames we encounter when stepping into solidarity with one another, mapping out how negotiating shame can come to represent feminism as a multiplicity. Drawing from shame researchers like Ahmed (2015), Brown (2006), Harris-Perry (2011), and Halberstam (2005b) and Black feminist theorists like Crenshaw (1991), hooks (1992), Lorde (1984), Alexander, (2005), Hill-Collins (2017) and many others, I ask what shame does to feminists in solidarity with one another. To try to answer this question, I rely on Black feminist theory and methodology, focusing on autoethnography as well as a critical discourse analysis of two of Octavia Butler's novels, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). The following research questions guide my analysis: 1a) How is shame conceptualized in shame research? 1b) How does shame function and why? 2) How does shame hinder our interpersonal relationships with one another? 3a) What does shame do to the mind-body? and 3b) What implications does this have for feminists? Octavia Butler's fiction provides representations of shame that help us to conceptualize harms that result when feminists are affected by an excess accumulation of shame. This study hypothesizes that, to avoid being derailed by difficult emotions like shame, we must explore different conceptions of shame as essential contributions to feminist understandings of solidarity.

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This project aims to explore the affective experiences of Black mothering within an anti-black context by analyzing podcast episodes. The project is organized by examining a) socio-historical constructions of race and gender which influenced Black motherhood and mothering experiences during chattel slavery, b) how those meanings have informed contemporary social constructions around Black mothering in opposition to normative mothering and motherhood–defined as white, cisgender, and middle class and c) the ways affect appears in Black mothering strategies today in a country that many argue continues to devalue Black lives The following questions ground this project: 1) How do social constructions around normative motherhood as a raced, gendered, and classed institution continue to impact Black women's mothering experiences, and 2) How do Black mothers narrate their mothering experiences, including their affective experiences of mothering within the U.S.? To capture Black mothers' sentiments around mothering, I used purposive sampling to select 33 podcasts from mothering blogs and a content platform that compiled lists of recommended podcasts of Black mothers speaking on mothering and other related topics. I analyzed the dialogue in 15 episodes of Black mother's reported experiences. I arranged the findings under three categories of affect: the affect of surrender and survival, the affect of agency, and the affect of community which is reflected in the conceptual framework of liberatory parenting. / Master of Science / For my thesis, I investigated how Black mothers parent within the U.S. and explored the feelings that shaped their mothering experiences. In this project, mothering is defined as the actions and strategies. Black women used to navigate raising children within an anti-black society. I first examined the ways chattel slavery influenced mothering for Black women and, from this, informed the social constructions that currently exist around Black mothers. These social constructions created centered on the experiences of white, cisgender, middle-class women, which were defined as normative motherhood and mothering. I argue that the social-historical context surrounding Black motherhood and mothering impacts how it is shown contemporarily. I listened to the voices of Black mothers describing their experiences with mothering from podcasts. I drew from their responses and developed a conceptual framework called "Liberatory Parenting" that represents the feelings that come up for Black mothers, which includes survival and surrender, agency, and community.

Black girls continue to suffer from inequitable treatment in schools resulting in disparate academic and social outcomes. While deficit ideologists have continued to attribute outcomes to cultural deficiencies within the Black community, research has found various systemic issues of racism and sexism seriously affecting Black girls in schools. However, the experiences of this population remain under or uninvestigated. When Black girls’ experiences in school are investigated, they are commonly framed as a group in need of saving and their perspectives and voices eliminated from the work. Further, this group is often homogenized and all their experiences limited to those of the inner-city or urban environments. Using a critical raced-gendered epistemology, grounded in critical race theory and Black feminism/womanism, this qualitative interview study explores Black high school girls’ experiences in a predominately White suburban public school in the southeast. Through the method of storytelling that includes constructing counter narratives, five girls (ages 14-16) relay their experiences in this predominately White suburban educational space. Parent reflections as well as document review augment these girls’ stories to further illuminate their experience. A grounded theory analysis of these data uses my own cultural intuition. This analytic approach foregrounds the intersectionality of Black girls’ understanding of their racial and gendered educational experiences in a predominantly White suburban environment, the systemic barriers that serve to inhibit their success, and the methods of resistance girls use to persist in these spaces. This study is significant in both its methodology as well as results, offering critical insight into how to conduct equitable and liberatory research and create education policies to improve outcomes for this underserved group.

A viewpoint of the intersectional and complex nature of identity is seen to be integral to the understanding of the identities of black female students. ‘Identity constructions of black South African female students’ is an exploratory study with a view to understand the identities of black South African women in institutions of higher learning and education. The study investigated the experiences of 16 female South African black students; with a focus on their race category, gender as well as class subject positions. The study is placed within the context of the Historically White University (HWU) and was specifically conducted in a HWU situated in Johannesburg. The students’ articulations of their university experiences were explored qualitatively, within three focus group discussions through an open-ended interview guideline. Results show that their education is accounted for as a significant influence in their subjectivity given the social mobility it grants as the women’s experience of self shifts as does their position in society. Furthermore it was found that with the cultural capital attained through education, notions of class, racial and gender identities are affected and a multiplicity of identities exists as a result.

For decades, situational comedies — commonly named “sitcoms” — have been racially segregated on TV between Black-cast sitcoms and White-cast sitcoms. Extensive research has been led about representation of Black and White masculinities in this segregated context. This master thesis studies what happens when White and Black males are equally casted as main characters in contemporary sitcoms by offering a case-study of the 2011 sitcom New Girl (2011-2017). How is Black masculinity represented in New Girl, and in which ways does it intersect with contemporary societal issues (e.g. racial profiling, Black Lives Matter movement)? This case-study uses tools, methodologies and concepts, drawn from Black and Intersectional feminism as well as Feminist media studies. Based on a 25 episodes sample of the show, it implements Ronald Jackson’s traditional stereotypes classification and “Black masculine identity theory” (Jackson, 2006) to study representations of Black masculinity in New Girl, through its two main Black male characters, Winston and Coach. Given that representations of minorities in popular culture reflect and influence our contemporary society, the results offer new insights about how sitcoms, series and popculture productions in general can challenge traditional stereotypes and display a more progressive Black masculinity.