Capturing Black beauty: Ontological beauty through photo-elicitation

Black women’s beauty experiences are deeply connected to their social and political locations. This study uses photo-elicitation and semi-structured interviewing with Black women in the United States to explore how they understand and express Black beauty. Participants’ embodied sense-making around beauty is grouped into three themes: ‘embodied resistance’, ‘Black feminisms and intersectionality’ and ‘Black pan-ethnicity’. Together, their insights reveal a new perspective on the meaning of Black beauty that I theorize as ‘ontological beauty’. Ontological beauty conceptualizes beauty as the culmination of a number of factors related to the nature of existence and being human. Further, ontological beauty can be applied to the body, fashion, aesthetics and other elements of embodiment. Ultimately, notions of Black beauty come into clearer legibility as inseparable from Black social and political experiences, locations and positionalities.