Black Women-in-White Dresses: A Critical Study in the Scholarly Aesthetics of Womanist Religious Thought

Abstract

Representation is a trap for engaging the experiences of Black women in religious thought. The failure to capture the experiences of all Black women in religious thought is characteristic of the scholarly aesthetic of womanist religious thought. Scholarly Aesthetic is a term from Victor Anderson’s “Black Scholarly Aesthetics and the Religious Critic: Black Experience as Manifolds of Manifestations and Powers of Presentations” and Beyond Ontological Blackness. This dissertation explores the deployment of Black women’s experience in womanist religious thought. In doing so, this dissertation argues that the conflation of experience and culture as representation results in an overreliance on Alice Walker’s womanist definition. Womanist religious thought fails to speak for Black women beyond representative figures that deify Black women and uphold cis-heteropatriarchy. Using theories of representation from cultural theorist Stuart Hall and iconicity from art historian Nicole Fleetwood, this dissertation troubles using figures to do the work of womanist religious thought. This dissertation reads several incidents that reinforce the problematic nature of representation to engage Black women’s experiences. New modes of womanist religious thought, such as millennial womanism, fail to address missing experiences. Instead, millennial womanism offers technology and social media as new source materials for curating Black women’s experiences. This dissertation ends by considering how and why womanist religious thought is concerned solely with the experiences of cisgender Black women.