Examining novelists, bloggers, and other creators of new media, this study focuses on autobiography by American black women since 1980, including Audre Lorde, Jill Nelson, and Janet Jackson. As Curtis argues, these women used embodiment as a strategy of drawing the audience into visceral identification with them and thus forestalling stereotypes.

"This book traces the long arc of Black women's relationship with technology from the antebellum south to the social media era demonstrating how digital culture transforms and is transformed by Black feminist thought"--

Minority Women and Western Media: Challenging Representations and Articulating New Voices presents research examining media portrayals of women from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. It provides qualitative and quantitative findings of how women are stereotyped and misrepresented not only because of their gender but also their race, religion, ability, physical attributes, and political status. Whilst their voices are frequently excluded, marginalized and misrepresented, the chapters in this volume show how minority women are creating and articulating new discourses and challenging assumptions and expectations about themselves. This book provides insights into how women are represented in different media, including newspapers, television shows, films, and online platforms. Scholars of media studies, women’s studies, and communication will find this book particularly useful.

From the 1760s to Barack Obama, this collection offers fresh looks at classic African American life narratives; highlights neglected African American lives, texts, and genres; and discusses the diverse outpouring of twenty-first-century memoirs.

Winner, Diamond Anniversary Book Award, awarded by the National Communication Association Winner, 2022 Nancy Baym Book Award, given by the Association of Internet Researchers Traces the longstanding relationship between technology and Black feminist thought Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But, Catherine Knight Steele argues that Black women’s relationship to technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,” Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the United States and its ability to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in a conversation about the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on and offline. Positioning Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, Steele offers a through-line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century. She makes connections among the letters, news articles, and essays of Black feminist writers of the past and a digital archive of blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories of some of the most well-known Black feminist writers of our time. Linking narratives and existing literature about Black women’s technology use in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century, Digital Black Feminism traverses the bounds between historical and archival analysis and empirical internet studies, forcing a reconciliation between fields and methods that are not always in conversation. As the work of Black feminist writers now reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers both hopefulness and caution on the implications of Black feminism becoming a digital product.

Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok explores how hip hop culture -- principally music and dance -- is used to construct and perform identity and maintain a growing urban youth subculture. This community finds its home on Dubsmash, a social media app that lets users record short dance challenge videos before cross-sharing them on different social media apps such as Instagram and Snapchat. Author Trevor Boffone interrogates the roles that Dubsmash, social media, and hip hop music and dance play in youth identity formation in the United States. These so-called Dubsmashers privilege their cultural and individual identities through the use of performance strategies that reinforce notions of community and social media interconnectedness in the digital age. These young people create a sense of identity and community that informs and is informed by hip hop culture. As such, the book argues that Dubsmash serves as a fundamental space to fashion contemporary youth identity. To do this, the book re-appropriates the term "Renegade" to explain the nuanced ways that Dubsmashers take up visual and sonic space on social media apps to self-fashion identity, form supportive digital communities, and exert agency to take up space that is often denied to them in other facets of their lives.

The lives and writings of six leading Black Buddhist women—Jan Willis, bell hooks, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, angel Kyodo williams, Spring Washam, and Faith Adiele—reveal new expressions of Buddhism rooted in ancestry, love, and collective liberation. Lifting as They Climb is a love letter of freedom and self-expression from six Black women Buddhist teachers, conveyed through the voice of author Toni Pressley-Sanon, one of the innumerable people who have benefitted from their wisdom. She explores their remarkable lives and undertakes deep readings of their work, weaving them into the broader tapestry of the African diaspora and the historical struggle for Black liberation. Black women in the U.S. have adapted Buddhist practice to meet challenges ranging from the injustices of the Jim Crow South to sexual violence, social discrimination, and bias within their Buddhist communities. Using their voices through the practice of memoir and other forms of writing, they have not only realized their own liberation but carried forward the Black tradition of leading others on the path toward collective awakening.