Black women’s digital feminism and self-advocacy: A cross-platform analysis of Black women's beauty culture

Historically, U.S beauty culture has been an important site of political contestation for Black women due to racist and sexist logics that label Black women as animalistic, unfeminine, and hypersexual beings. Black women had to create their own hair care lines, open their own beauty shops that catered to Black hair, and create their own media to celebrate their beauty. The same is true in the digital age, where the technological affordances of social networking platforms have given rise to a community of Black women creators that navigate their exclusion in U.S beauty culture and the creative economy. Thus, my dissertation explores how Black women’s content creation challenges problematic representations of Black women and amplifies community practices of self-empowerment and self-care. I rely on Black feminist theory, influencer and platform studies, feminist technology studies, and race and technology studies to examine the intersection of Black women’s digital and beauty culture. I analyze three case studies through digital ethnography (Abidin, 2019) and critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) (Brock, 2016). The first case study focuses on a conflict between Mexican-American boy beauty influencer, Manny MUA, and Black beauty guru, Chelsie Wvrthy to analyze how digital cultural appropriation allows non-Black women creators to profit from Black feminine aesthetics within the influencer economy. The second case study examines Black women’s mobilization of Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to practice a politics of citation for Black women creators like Wvrthy. Lastly, the final case study investigates Black women’s call out culture on Twitter and Instagram in contestation of the cosmetic brand, Beautyblender, and their racist and colorist marketing for their first complexion product. Through these case studies, I argue that social media is a materialization of traditional racial geographies, which displace, commodify, and exploit Black women. This project illuminates the unique ways Black women create their own means to resist oppression through everyday digital practice. Further, I argue that Black women’s digital culture makes possible a Black feminist futurity (Campt, 2017), in which Black women grapple with their precarity, while actively engaging in everyday labor of creating an alternative future.