All Abstracts

Patrice Brown, a curvy paraprofessional and rising Internet celebrity known as #TeacherBae, emerged in September 2016. She was both praised and chastised for her figure and her form fitting work attire. Pop culture articles about #TeacherBae opened a larger conversation about Black women’s bodies ...

Sports documentaries offer an opportunity to see just how much race matters in America. In the past thirty years, there has been a significant rise in the production of sports documentaries as athletes have become world-wide celebrities. Within a number of these documentaries a specific narrative ha...

Black music is a term that describes music that is produced or inspired by Black people. Black music, such as blues, jazz, soul, and rhythm & blues, explores Black pain. Black women singer-songwriters have shared trauma and presented their experiences of Black womanhood by presenting and politic...

In “Blogging while Black,” Catherine Knight Steele invites us to consider blogs as “sites where black women interrogate the intersectionality of race and gender from a black feminist perspective” (2). Because my project is rooted in English-language literature, I analyze the role of a blog ...

Television is often used to promote dominant ideologies and to define social and cultural norms and expectations. Reality television has been has been singled out by scholars and critics because its supposedly “real” content is in fact intentionally structured and presented to emphasize ideologi...

Black Lesbian Fiction emerged as a literary genre out of the cultural work of Black feminists of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The genre’s formal beginning was marked in 1974 by the publication of the novel, Loving Her. Despite its cultural significance, Black Lesbian Fiction and the writers who work...