The Black Woman That Media Built:Content Creation, Interpretation, and the Making of the Black Female Self.

cultural studies;womanism;audience reception;identity formation;new media;spirituality;African-American Studies;Religious Studies;Women"s and Gender Studies;Communications;Humanities;Social Sciences;Communication Studies

Tounsel, Timeka NicolScannell, Gerald Patrick ;

University of Michigan

关键词: cultural studies;    womanism;    audience reception;    identity formation;    new media;    spirituality;    African-American Studies;    Religious Studies;    Women";    s and Gender Studies;    Communications;    Humanities;    Social Sciences;    Communication Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/111530/timekani_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This study is a qualitative, womanist inquiry into the ways that black women engage media texts through their interpretive work and through content creation. The study explores the media landscape, the interconnected domain of commercial and non-commercial media texts, as both a place where black women perform the self and a place where the black female self takes shape. Interpreting mediated scripts of black womanhood is also a profound practice where black women co-construct what it means to be a black woman. Hence, this study is concerned with the interactive processes of meaning making—that is, understanding representations of black womanhood—and identity formation, or understanding and defining black womanhood at large. The media texts considered in this study include television, film, radio, print and online platforms. Black women’s interpretations of media and their social experiences, especially with other black women, constitute a matrix of influence that black women draw from as they define and negotiate performances of the black female self. This study attends to that matrix as a circuit of culture: media, sociocultural value systems such as religion, and interaction with an interpretive community of other black women. The study is based on interview data from 30 black women: 15 are professional content creators, 15 are audience members. Taken together, the study offers expanded insights for defining complex media engagement practices among audiences. Specifically, the data speak to the ways in which black women have become experts at making do—manipulating a problematic media landscape to satisfy yearnings for role models, and for a space to testify to their own personal understandings of black womanhood. Through their testimonies study participants demonstrate the need to consider web-based content creation as a form of meaningful identity management that is enhanced, and not sullied, by the interactive capacities of an audience.