This project explores the origins and spiritual impact of Black Super Shero Syndrome on Christian women. It proposes that Black women embrace creative communal contemplation to move from spiritual floundering to spiritual flourishing. Grounded in research on African American contemplative spirituality, Black women’s spirituality, and Ignatian spirituality, the project adapts the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola to create a Black Super Shero Sabbath Retreat that explores themes of healing, surrender, communion, community, rest, and sabbath to inspire and equip Black women to move from unhealthy Black Super Sheroes to Beloved Daughters of God. / 2026-07-24T00:00:00Z

<p dir="ltr"><i>Conjure, Care, Calls, and Cauls</i> centers the histories of Black and southern conjuring midwives in life, lore, and literature. I argue that these conjuring midwives are practitioners of wholistic care who employ conjure work as a method to access wholeness. This avenue to access Black wholeness was intentionally disrupted by 20^th century physicians across the United States and the South. These physicians espoused <i>disabling racist rhetoric</i> to attack Black midwives’ bodies and beliefs as dangerous, casting them as unreliable and unsafe caregivers. Widely circulated in US medical journals, physicians articulated a national and regional “midwife problem” that led to the overwhelming removal of Black midwives from US medical care. This successful displacement of Black midwives by Western medicine and its physicians created and perpetuated what I name the <i>crazy conjure lady trope</i>, the disabling stereotype that considers the Black folk health practitioner or believer as crazy, insane, or otherwise unwell in Black women’s literature and lives. Using Black feminist literary criticism and a Black feminist disability framework, I consider Toni Cade Bambara’s <i>The Salt Eaters </i>(1981), Gloria Naylor’s <i>Mama Day </i>(1988), and Jesmyn Ward’s <i>Sing, Unburied, Sing </i>(2017) alongside Black midwives’ ethnographies and autobiographies to center and consider the Black southern conjuring midwife in Black women’s literature and US history.</p>

Using data from the Black Women's Health Study (BWHS) and building on what is currently known about perceptions of racism and discrimination and its mechanisms, this study attempts to demonstrate the value of identifying additional variables that may serve as potential risk factors for obesity among African American women. Using secondary data analysis, the purpose of this study was to expand the scope of existing obesity research by examining a 1997 cross-sectional dataset of self-reported questionnaire responses among a random sample of African American women enrolled in the Black Women's Health Study (BWHS) to examine the association between perceptions of racism and discrimination within 3 domains (e.g., perceived racism, institutional racism, race consciousness) and body mass index (BMI) after controlling for selected sociodemographic, psychological, behavioral, and reproductive factors. The general hypothesis of the study was that self-reported responses to perceptions and experiences of racism and discrimination would be significantly associated with differences in weight (as measured by BMI) among the sample utilized for the current study. A convenience sample of 5,044 African American women enrolled in the BWHS was included for analysis in this non-probability cross-sectional study. A biopsychosocial theoretical framework was used to understand the unique role of perceived racism, institutional racism and race consciousness had on body mass index (BMI) among the BWHS cohort. These factors were examined because of their relevance to African American females' experiences. The data were analyzed through hierarchical multiple and logistic regression through SPSS 14.0.The major findings of this research indicate that a large random sample of African American women enrolled in the Black Women's Health Study found a clear relationship between perceived racism and body mass index (BMI). Results revealed consistent with the study's main hypothesis that self-reported responses to perceptions and experiences of racial discrimination would be significantly associated with differences in weight (as measured by BMI), the summary variable for perceived racism was significantly correlated with body mass index (BMI) among the BWHS cohort. Elevated odds ratios were observed for the variable that summarized perceived racism. Elevated odds ratios were also observed for most of the individual perceived racism questions. Results also revealed the variable for race consciousness was a significant individual predictor of body mass index (BMI) among the sample. Notably, perceptions and experiences of racial discrimination did not predict differences in the level of obesity among the sample. Overall, the finding that the summary variable for perceived racism was predictive of the odds of being obese (BMI > 30kg/m') vs. non-obese (BMI ≥ 30kg/m 2 ) in the regression analyses, even in the presence of other theoretically related variables, provides strong support for the unique role of perceived racism as a risk factor for obesity in African American women. The major implications of this research include (a) gaining a better understanding of the factors associated with perceived racial discrimination and reported frequency among African American women; (b) use of social health indicators in Healthy People 2010 and 2020 that consider the influence of racial discrimination in health outcomes that can be used to develop strategies to generate public dialogue and create a better defined policy landscape and health agenda informed by social justice and reflects multiple levels of influence (e.g., individual behavior, community or neighborhood attributes, and broad policy change) as it pertains to the ethnic and racial disparity in obesity; lends further support to both HP2010 and HP2020 goals and objectives for future policy actions to guide the development of culturally competent prevention programming aimed at reducing the prevalence of obesity among African American women; (c) recognition of race-related stress as a contributing risk factor for obesity in African American women; (d) recognition of the need to improve the measurement of perceived racial discrimination through questions that adequately measure the stress and coping related to the experiences of racism; (e) better restructuring of selected agencies that fund health research to broaden research topics regarding African American women as a homogeneous group; and (f) expansion of the U.S. healthcare system to incorporate established cultural competence guidelines and practices to address social and structural causes of race-related stressors that negatively impact the health status of African American women and similar minority populations at-risk for obesity.

This dissertation discusses Gayl Jones’s and Toni Morrison’s characterisation of black women’s journeying towards empowered subjectivity and agency. Through comparative analysis of eight fictional works, I explore the writers’ idea of female freedom and emancipation, the structures of power affecting the transition from oppressed towards liberated subject positions, and the literary techniques through which the authors facilitate these seminal trajectories. My research addresses a corpus comprised of three novels and one book-long poem by Gayl Jones, as well as four novels by Toni Morrison. These two writers emerge in the US literary scene during the 1970s, one of the decades of the second black women’s renaissance (1970s, 1980s). This period witnessed unprecedented developments in US black literature and feminist theorising. In the domain of African American letters, it witnessed the emergence of a host of black women writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison. This period also marks a turning point in the reconfiguration of African American literature, as several unknown or misplaced literary works by pioneering black women writers were discovered, shifting the chronology of African American literature. Moreover, the second black women's renaissance marks a paradigmatic development in black feminist theorising on womanhood and subjectivity. Many black feminist scholars and activists challenged what they perceived to be the homogenising female subject conceptualised by US white middle-class feminism and the androcentricity of the subject proclaimed by the Black Aesthetic Movement. They claimed that, in focusing solely on gender and patriarchal oppression, white feminism had overlooked the salience of the race/class nexus, while focus by the Black Aesthetic Movement on racism had overlooked the salience of gender and heterosexual discrimination. In this dissertation, I discuss the works of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison in the context of seminal debates on the nature of the female subject and the racial and gender politics affecting the construction of empowered subjectivities in black women's fiction. Through the metaphor of journeying towards female empowerment, I show how Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison engage in imaginative returns to the past in an attempt to relocate black women as literary subjects of primary importance. I also show how, in the works selected for discussion, a complex idea of modern female subjectivities emerges from the writers' re-examination of the oppressive material and psychological circumstances under which pioneering black women lived, the common practice of sexual exploitation with which they had to contend, and the struggle to assert the dignity of their womanhood beyond the parameters of the white-defined “ideological discourse of true womanhood” (Carby, 1987: 25).

This paper focuses on mysteries written by the Afro-American women authors Barbara Neely and Valerie Wilson Wesley. Both authors place a black woman in the role of the detective - an innovative feature not only in the realm of female detective literature of the past two decades but also with regard to the current discourse about race and class in US-American society.<br><br> This discourse is important because detective novels are considered popular literature and thus a mass product designed to favor commercial instead of literary claims. Thus, the focus is placed on the development of the two protagonists, on their lives as detectives and as black women, in order to find out whether or not and how the genre influences the depiction of Afro-American experiences. It appears that both of these detective series represent Afro-American culture in different ways, which confirms a heterogenic development of this ethnic group. However, the protagonist's search for identity and their relationships to white people could be identified as a major unifying claim of Afro-American literature.<br><br> With differing intensity, the authors Neely and Wesley provide the white or mainstream reader with insight into their culture and confront the reader&#39;s ignorance of black culture. In light of this, it is a great achievement that Neely and Wesley have reached not only a black audience but also a growing number of white readers. / Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit stehen die Detektivserien der afroamerikanischen Autorinnen Barbara Neely und Valerie Wilson Wesley. Die Blanche White Mysteries von Neely und die Tamara Hayle Mysteries von Wesley repräsentieren mit der Einführung der schwarzen Hausangestellten Blanche White als Amateurdetektivin und der schwarzen Privatdetektivin Tamara Hayle nicht nur hinsichtlich der innerhalb der letzten zwanzig Jahre erschienen Welle von Kriminalautorinnen mit weiblichen Detektiven eine Innovation, sondern auch bezüglich der mit diesen Hauptfiguren verbundenen Auseinandersetzungen mit Klassenstatus und Rassismus.<br><br> Die bisher erschienen Detektivromane beider Serien werden in dieser Arbeit im Hinblick auf ihre Präsentation der Erfahrungen der Afroamerikaner in den USA der 1990er Jahre untersucht. Da Detektivromane der Populärliteratur zugerechnet werden und entsprechend ihrer Befriedigung von Massenansprüchen &quot;produziert&quot; werden, war die Fragestellung, ob in den genannten Detektivserien diese Hinwendung zur Mainstreamkultur mit einer verringerten Darstellung der afroamerikanischen Probleme und Lebensweise verbunden ist. Bei der Analyse der Serien wurde deshalb der Entwicklung der Protagonistinnen als Detektivinnen und als schwarze Frauen sowie der Wirkung ihrer Erzählerstimme besondere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt.<br><br> Die beiden Serien repräsentieren die afroamerikanische Kultur auf unterschiedlichen Erfahrungsstufen, woran erkennbar ist, dass die afroamerikanische Bevölkerung in den USA keine homogene Gruppe darstellt. Ausschlaggebend für das Erreichen des Anspruchs der Afroamerikaner an ihre Literatur scheint die Auseinandersetzung mit Fragen der Identitätsfindung der schwarzen Protagonistinnen und der Beziehungen zwischen Schwarzen und Weißen zu sein. Den Autorinnen gelingt es in unterschiedlichem Maße den weißen und somit Mainstream-Lesern nicht nur einen Einblick in ihre Kultur zu vermitteln, sondern vielmehr, sie direkt mit ihrer Ignoranz gegenüber dieser schwarzen Kultur zu konfrontieren. Neelys und Wesleys große Leistung ist, dass die Stimmen ihrer Protagonistinnen sowohl ein zahlreiches schwarzes als auch ein wachsendes weißes Publikum erreichen.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.

No description available.

Cette thèse s'intéresse à la "presse féminine noire", c'est-à-dire aux magazines qui s'adressent à des femmes partageant l'expérience sociale d'être perçues comme noires. Elle se fonde sur une analyse des contenus, nourrie par une enquête auprès de lectrices et des producteurs des magazines Amina, Miss Ebène et Brune en France. Entreprises commerciales et supports d'identification, ces médias témoignent de l'existence de consommatrices mais aussi de lectrices en quête de reconnaissance sociale. Leurs ressources publicitaires et leurs conditions de production révèlent une "ligne de couleur" dans la presse féminine française. Ces magazines, qui sont également distribués en Afrique francophone et aux Antilles, s’inscrivent dans un espace qui déborde les frontières nationales tout en assignant leur lectorat à un "entre soi". Les ambiguïtés des représentations qu'ils véhiculent sont inhérentes à la nécessité de relier l'ici à l'ailleurs, de valoriser des singularités phénotypiques tout en se conformant aux critères hégémoniques de la beauté et de soutenir l'émancipation féminine tout en conservant des spécificités culturelles. Cette recherche soulève plus largement les enjeux relatifs à la reconnaissance des minorités comme productrices et réceptrices des médias dans un contexte politique marqué par un idéal universaliste qui ne reconnaît pas leur existence. / The focus of this thesis is on magazines addressing women sharing the social experience of being perceived as black. It is based on a content analysis, fuelled by enquiries on the producers and readers of magazines Amina, Miss Ebène and Brune in France. These magazines are also distributed in francophone Africa and in the Caribbean. Commercial companies and identification supports, these magazine bear witness of the existence of the consumers but also of readers in search of social recognition. The advertising resources and the production conditions of the media reveal the existence of a “colour line” in the French women’s press. The analysis of the representations conveyed by each magazine reveals ambiguities, as much as in the contents as in the positioning, inherent to the need of linking the here and elsewhere promoting phenotypic singularities while conforming to the hegemonic criteria of beauty, supporting the emancipation of women while preserving cultural characteristics. This work, more broadly, raises issues concerning the recognition of minorities as producers and receptors of the media in a political context marked by a Universalist ideal that does not recognize their existence.

Abstract Black women are disproportionately affected by adverse health conditions, such as obesity and heart disease. For example, more black women currently die from complications associated with diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure than any other ethnic group in the United States (Gourdine 2011). There are however, increasing numbers of everyday black women who defy these statistics and are positive role models for all women. One such group of women is the New Orleans chapter of Sistas On The Move (SOTM), an all-female running group that emphasizes the importance of black women’s health and builds community around physical activity. Through field interviews and participant observation, I examine the following questions: What motivates these women to run, walk and lead healthy lifestyles in New Orleans? How do SOTM members claim and utilize space in New Orleans for their physical health and social activities?

This dissertation assesses rage and its utility for fictional Black girls and adolescents in asserting their humanity, accessing their voices, and developing strategies of resistance that contribute to their identity formation. Through analyses of six novels: 1) God Bless the Child, 2) Breath, Eyes, Memory, 3) The Hate U Give, 4) The Bluest Eye, 5) Daddy Was a Number Runner, and 6) The Poet X, this research presents rage as a canonical theme in Black women’s coming-of-age narratives and presents connections between rage, rights, and resistance. The connections, revealed through stimuli and adaptations associated with rage, frame an argument for North Americas as an arbiter of anger. The novels construct an “arc of anger” that places them in conversation about Black girl rage and presents a tradition of Black women crafting Black girl protagonists who are conduits for counternarratives of rage. This dissertation also examines how history, memory, and culture contribute to Black girls’ frustrations and knowledge bases. By looking to works published between the angry decade (the 1960s) and the age of rage (the 2010s), the research presents ways Black women novelists and their characters return to rage to combat social institutions and critique social constructions of Black girlhood and womanhood.