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THE REVOLUTION IS NOT HAPPENING ON THE LIFETIME NETWORK: A CONJUNCTURAL ANALYSIS OF ARTICULATIONS OF BLACK WOMANHOOD ON LIFETIME’S REALITY TELEVISION PROGRAMS IN THE #SAYHERNAME ERA

This dissertation explores articulations of Black Womanhood during the socio-political crisis of police brutality against Black women during the 2010s. I use Stuart Hall’s concepts of conjuncture and articulation as the orientation to analyze three of Lifetime’s original reality television programs: Dance Moms, Bring It!, and Girlfriend Intervention. I contend that the discourses on these shows create articulations of Black womanhood that fail to reflect the realities of the complex social struggles and state-sanctioned police violence against unarmed Black women that led to the #SayHerName movement. Rather than portray the full realities of the Black female experience, the shows conceal the social unsettling experiences of being a Black woman in order to bring entertaining and banal discourses to the forefront. As such, those reductive articulations of Black Womanhood act as an unstable settlement, a temporary joist to the national social formation in an attempt to avoid radical socio-political reconfigurations.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:siu.edu/oai:opensiuc.lib.siu.edu:dissertations-2986
Date01 December 2021
CreatorsGiannino, Steven
PublisherOpenSIUC
Source SetsSouthern Illinois University Carbondale
Detected LanguageEnglish
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SourceDissertations

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