Changing the Letter: Theorizing Race and Gender in Pop Cultural 'Media' Through a Less Pornotropic Lens

Abstract

This dissertation argues that religious and cultural media are socially organized technologies of power that reproduce, maintain, circulate, and exchange historical myths on black womanhood, which black women and girls both resist and appropriate. Notwithstanding how they may be resisted or appropriated, operative historical myths need to be deconstructed and, in many cases, disoriented. To achieve this, deploying religious, cultural, ideological and black feminist analyses, I construct a black “feminist religio-cultural criticism” for reading black womanhood less pornotropically in three sites: theological discourse, televangelism, and black popular culture. The aim of this project is that black women and girls might be seen in terms of their complex inter-subjective multi-positionality as opposed to circulating taken for granted scripts on “black womanhood” that hold them captive to oppressive normative claims.