In this study, I argue that theorizing about the lived experiences of Black diasporic subjects, specifically, Sub-Saharan African women living in the U.S., must simultaneously take into account cultural parameters of their home country and host culture. I use the term “Black feminisms” as an umbrella term to advocate for an interdisciplinary approach to Black feminist thought and African feminism as tools for analyzing the lived experiences of Sub-Saharan women in diaspora. Specifically, this dissertation investigates how Sub-Saharan women living in the U.S. define, understand and orient to feminist practices in everyday life and how such processes shape their identities as diasporic subjects. By doing so, it seeks to examine how Black feminisms can operate as a tool for promoting social justice through the analysis of Sub-Saharan women’s identity politics in diasporic contexts. To gain insights on Sub-Saharan women’s understanding and performance of feminisms across cultures, I relied on a combination of ethnographic methods. First, I used a critical-performance ethnographic framework to explore how feminism is understood and deployed by Sub-Saharan women in diasporic contexts. My data were collected via a combination of in-depth qualitative interviews, co-performative fieldwork, and every day interactions. Second, I used autoethnographic narrative to explore my own everyday performances of feminisms as a diasporic Congolese woman moving between Congolese and American cultures. Participants’ lived experiences reveal that diaspora operates as a liminal/third/”in-between” space where Sub-Saharan women have to constantly negotiate gendered practices in everyday life at the borderland of two cultural worldviews: African and American. By immigrating to the U.S., these women are expected to integrate the cultural and social values of their host culture while maintaining the customs, traditions, and beliefs that constitute their African cultural legacy and which continue to shape their identities in their daily life. Consequently, while participants unanimously agreed on the relevance of feminism for improving the living conditions of African women on the continent and elsewhere, they insisted on a feminist agenda resonant with the peculiarities of African culture, yet promoting cultural exchange between African and American cultures. In light of these findings, this dissertation advocates for a hybrid feminist agenda - which I refer to as “Black diasporic feminism”- applicable to the lived experiences of Sub-Saharan women in diasporic contexts.

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First described by physician William Dietz in 1995, the "Food Insecurity-Obesity Paradox" (FIOP) attempts to explain the biology and behaviors of people who are simultaneously overweight and food-insecure. I was introduced to this theory as a Behavioral Health graduate student and, in that context, was taught to understand it as a fact. My personal experiences as a Black woman, however, alongside ongoing engagement with Black feminist thought and critical medical sociology, have taught me otherwise. This disssertation takes Dietz's theory as a starting point in order to argue that Black women in the US experience fatphobic and racial discrimination while being "cared for" by western institutional medicine. I argue that discourses like the FIOP, though framed as benevolent clinical theories, do more harm than good: not only do they multiply pathologize so-called "fat" Black women by drawing on disparaging stereotypes, but they simultaneously ignore the specific health and wellness needs that emerge at the intersection of weight, size, skin color, gender, ability, and economic class. My broader dissertation project is an interdisciplinary critique of pathologizing discourses about Black women, including medically "legitimate" ones like the FIOP. Via critical analysis of these discourses, and employing Black feminist and medical sociological perspectives, I explore how stereotypes of Black women correlate with how these women are perceived and treated by physicians and other health professionals. These racialized perceptions and forms of discriminatory medical treatment are instances of what has been labeled, variously, as a racial formation (Omi and Winant, 1997), a matrix of domination (Patricia Hill Collins, 1990) and a racial ideology (Feagin, 2006). These processes are further extended by physicians who use these pathologizing discourses and practices to advance their own careers. Black feminist theorists have described the multiple marginalizations experienced by contemporary Black women in the US and my project places weight and body size within this marginalizing dynamic. After tracing the long history of medical "othering" of Black women by science, I show the persistence of these ideologies in contemporary medical practice. My interviews with Black women investigate their lived experiences of these ideologies and practices, and allow women to speak for themselves in a space that so often speaks for them. / Doctor of Philosophy / Black women's historical experiences in the US, including my own story, are akin to what Black feminist Melissa Harris-Perry in her book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (2011), calls the crooked room. Applying Harris-Perry's theorization of the crooked room to how medical institutions operate to cause Black thick women to be so quickly categorized as diseased, I have developed the concept of the Crooked Room of Medicine (CRoM) to describe the mental, emotional, and physical struggles Black women face at the intersection of race and gender stereotypes and false narratives particularly in medical settings. I utilize and build upon Black feminist theoretical frameworks as well as my own personal narrative to investigate how a society that is built on racialized and gendered systems has implications for how the large Black female body is interpreted as unhealthy and diseased when treated within these social and medical settings. Building on Tressie McMillan Cottom's scholarship, I utilize a methodology of what I call Thick Studies to develop a Gender Race Weight (GRW) matrix from the crooked room of medicine, to map out our experiences and develop a theory that focuses on healing. The result of Black women's disproportionately poor health outcomes is a result of a complex environment of barriers from quality health care, to racism, and stress correlated with the distinct social experiences of Black womanhood in U.S. society (Chinn. Martin, Redmond 2021). The heaviness of generational racialized trauma is still in our DNA (Degruy-Leary 2017). Racism and gender discrimination have profound impacts on the well-being of Black women. I argue for a holistic health treatment that addresses mind, body, emotion, and spirit and for an acknowledgement of Black women's knowledge of health and healing in relation to Black women, weight, and medical space.

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These pages include parts of the process diary, notes on process, reading, as well as photos from my research process.  These are abstracts of my research and therefore curated in their own right to show not only my somewhat sprawling process but also my honest attempt to share how I document and research in my process. These “written expositions” mirrors how I gather material when I work as a performer and performance maker. This document is as much about me finding out what I did in the project as you are attempting to understand the project´s content, methods and results. It is me looking at the produced material from the outside, curating it to try out words on the method, content and material. I have written about the work reflectively at the same time as I invite you into this action. It´s speculative and intimate.   During my master studies in Performing Arts, I have reflected on what it means to be a performer beyond the symbolic meaning of it- such, as being material or representation for someone else work. I have investigated what the performer spends time doing and reflecting on beyond what is seen “on stage”, and present that, whatever it is and looks like. I have then, in my final degree project, looked at how I can use my gained knowledge as a mainly interactive performer in relation to performance arts and black feminism theory to create my own artistic practice.   My aim has been to do this by being, meaning to exist with, breathing with, becoming part of, attending to and situating myself in relation to performance arts and black feminism theory in a mindful manner.

The concepts of intersectionality and interlocking identities came out of needs raised by communities and then academics wrote about it. This dissertation examines these concepts and how these resonate with the ways that feminist educators conceptualize and facilitate non-credit learning processes with women. This research focuses on 10 differently-located feminist educators and the processes they lead that meet a range of learning goals. Specifically, this research examines the learning practices that these educators used to help women learners gain a consciousness around their identity and issues of power and oppression. I then discuss how these practices resonate with the theoretical frameworks of intersecting and interlocking oppressions. Anti-oppression, feminist informed research and feminist standpoint theories informed the research approach. The Critical Appreciative Process, which builds on the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) method, was used to explore what is working within feminist non-credit learning processes. In addition, two case studies were elaborated on in order to examine the learning practices that were particularly successful. The educators reflected on several barriers involved in bringing differently-located women together to explore and address the power dynamics associated with power and oppression. These included the defensiveness, denial and avoidance associated with acknowledging and addressing privilege. The educators also shared effective practices for addressing such barriers. Key practices included creating an environment for difficult conversations, working intergenerationally, using theoretical frameworks to deconstructing interpersonal dynamics occurring in the group and providing tools to draw on everyday experiences and challenge (inappropriate) behaviours. Additionally, specific activities for raising learners’ awareness of their own complex and multiple identities and how these identities are co-constructed through interactions with others were detailed. This study revealed the limitations of intersectionality and interlocking identities frameworks in praxis, as well as the ways in which an awareness of identity, difference and power creates an entry point for intersectional and interlocking awareness that aids feminist movements. This research makes a contribution to strengthening the praxis of feminist educators facilitating non-credit processes. Within feminist theorizing, this research also makes an important contribution in contextualizing intersectionality and interlocking identities frameworks within a range of feminist non-credit learning practices.

The concepts of intersectionality and interlocking identities came out of needs raised by communities and then academics wrote about it. This dissertation examines these concepts and how these resonate with the ways that feminist educators conceptualize and facilitate non-credit learning processes with women. This research focuses on 10 differently-located feminist educators and the processes they lead that meet a range of learning goals. Specifically, this research examines the learning practices that these educators used to help women learners gain a consciousness around their identity and issues of power and oppression. I then discuss how these practices resonate with the theoretical frameworks of intersecting and interlocking oppressions. Anti-oppression, feminist informed research and feminist standpoint theories informed the research approach. The Critical Appreciative Process, which builds on the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) method, was used to explore what is working within feminist non-credit learning processes. In addition, two case studies were elaborated on in order to examine the learning practices that were particularly successful. The educators reflected on several barriers involved in bringing differently-located women together to explore and address the power dynamics associated with power and oppression. These included the defensiveness, denial and avoidance associated with acknowledging and addressing privilege. The educators also shared effective practices for addressing such barriers. Key practices included creating an environment for difficult conversations, working intergenerationally, using theoretical frameworks to deconstructing interpersonal dynamics occurring in the group and providing tools to draw on everyday experiences and challenge (inappropriate) behaviours. Additionally, specific activities for raising learners’ awareness of their own complex and multiple identities and how these identities are co-constructed through interactions with others were detailed. This study revealed the limitations of intersectionality and interlocking identities frameworks in praxis, as well as the ways in which an awareness of identity, difference and power creates an entry point for intersectional and interlocking awareness that aids feminist movements. This research makes a contribution to strengthening the praxis of feminist educators facilitating non-credit processes. Within feminist theorizing, this research also makes an important contribution in contextualizing intersectionality and interlocking identities frameworks within a range of feminist non-credit learning practices.