On October 27, 2023, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference held a keynote titled “Celebrating 50 Years of Women’s Creativity and Resistance in Hip-Hop and Beyond.” Moderated by Janell Hobson, the panel boasted luminaries like Toni Blackman, Drew Dixon, Dee Barnes, Monie Love, and Joan Morgan. These trailblazers have navigated the turbulent waters of the hip hop industry, confronting and creatively subverting the misogynoir endemic in the male-dominated U.S. rap scene. Take, for instance, the groundbreaking work of Joan Morgan. In 1999, she published When Chickenheads Come ..read more

St. Louis rapper, Sexxy Red, recently announced her second pregnancy, following a privacy violation where explicit content was posted on her Instagram. Despite speculation that the leak was intentional, due to her bold persona, Sexxy Red denies these claims. The suggestion that Sexxy Red would willingly use Instagram to premiere her sex tape eliminates the potential for her to be a victim of revenge porn. This ongoing denial of Black women’s victim status is a crucial topic discussed in Black feminist scholarship, particularly at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. The Inters ..read more

If you’re already familiar with my work, then you know I do Black feminist sociology that draws on Black feminist thought as conceptual framework for the mixed methods study of digital society. In this blog post, I want to discuss one of the predecessors of the field: Black sociology. Black sociology analyzes society from the standpoint of Black people to highlight how historical social structures affect them today. It offers a non-eurocentric perspective to address the interrelatedness of racial and economic inequality affecting society, making its practitioners scholar-activists who bridge t ..read more

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887, created the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Committees League (UNIA-ACL) in 1914. Garvey and his supporters adopted Pan-Africanism, which advocated conscious identification with Africa, political and economic resistance to European domination and racism, and solidarity across the African diaspora with the African continent. Slavery, colonialism, racism, and discrimination in the Americas and across the diaspora shaped this philosophy. The largest Pan-African organization of the 20th century, the UNIA connected the needs and in ..read more

Social movements are a process of collective action aimed at structural change. I am interested in the social psychology of collective action from the standpoint of Black women activists. My research adopts Black feminist thought as a lens through which to conduct a sociology of antiracist social movements in the contemporary era. However, Black feminist scholars from a wide range of fields have done research on Black women’s activism throughout history. Below is a list of five groups of Black women activists with some insights from Black feminist scholars. 1. Black Women in the Black Panther ..read more

It’s that time of year again! This list amplifies the academic books and edited volumes published in the year 2022 that center on the topic of Black women and Black feminist thought or are published by Black feminist, womanist, and African feminist scholars. The list cuts across disciplines with scholarship from history, sociology, theology, Black studies, and women and gender studies to name a few. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant – To Live More Abundantly: Black Collegiate Women, Howard University, and the Audacity of Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe   Candice Marie Benbow – Red Lip Theology ..read more

Jackie Aina. Naptural85. MakeupShayla. Jeanette Jenkins. If you’re familiar with these names, you are likely well versed in the world of social media influencers. In a chapter for the 2017 edition of The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, digital anthropologist Crystal Abidin offers the following definition of the term: Although the original concept pre-dates the Internet, today Influencers can be defined as everyday Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles. – A ..read more

If you’ve heard “bed wench,” it’s undoubtedly been used to disparage Black women. So what does the term mean? In her 2018 book When Rape Was Legal, sociologist Rachel A. Feinstein offers the following description: “Wench” creates and perpetuates a stereotype of black women as promiscuous, legitimating rape and sexual coercion against them by denying the possibility of their sexual victimization. – Feinstein (2018:75) Merriam-Webster defined a wench as “a young woman or girl,” but it may also apply to a “female servant” or describe women and girls with little social power. However, when deplo ..read more

When Diane Warren criticized Renaissance, Beyoncé’s latest album, she questioned on Twitter how one song could have 24 authors when all of her tracks only had one: herself. Warren’s statement highlights how in the U.S. music industry, only those who developed the original score — producers and composers — gain credit and compensation for the project, often times leaving the performer uncredited and underpaid. In his 2019 article for the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Matthew D. Morrison explains how eurocentric conceptions of what defines music and intellectual property underli ..read more

When people ask me what I do for a living, I explain that I am a Black feminist digital sociologist. My work looks at how Black people use digital technology to create or remix digital practices in ways that alter social processes and institutions in contemporary society. In the past, I have taken up methods of digital data analysis to explore hashtag activism on Twitter in relation to #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName. I think the approach to activism exemplified by #SayHerName, which I define as intersectional micromobilization, paints a picture of the ways Black internet users shift our con ..read more