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To be girl, digital, and Black: Black girls' digital media production as cultural discourse

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TitleInfo
Title
To be girl, digital, and Black: Black girls' digital media production as cultural discourse
Name (type = personal)
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Wade
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Ashleigh
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1985-
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Ashleigh Wade
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author
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Cooper
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Brittney C.
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Brittney C. Cooper
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chair
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Alexander-Floyd
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Nikol
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Nikol Alexander-Floyd
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Advisory Committee
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internal member
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Gerson
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Judith
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Judith Gerson
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Advisory Committee
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internal member
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Bratich
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Jack
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Jack Bratich
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Advisory Committee
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outside member
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Rutgers University
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degree grantor
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School of Graduate Studies
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school
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theses
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2019
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2019-05
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2019
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English
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the cultural discourse of girlhood that Black girls produce through use of digital media. I combine Black Feminist frameworks with media studies and spatial humanities to interrogate the productive possibilities of Black girls’ digital media practices. My project asks: How do Black girls use digital technologies to create photographs and videos that contribute to conversations about race, gender, and sexuality, and what might these images and conversations reveal about how Black girls both navigate and create spaces through cultural production? I employ semiotic analysis and ethnographic methods to understand how Black girls come to engage with digital media, how these interactions shape girls’ sense of self, and how these practices position Black girls as theorists of Black girlhood. By approaching Black girlhood as a site of production rather than merely consumption, my research shifts the focus in the existing literature on Black girlhood from a deficit or delinquency model to a productivity model. The project refuses a simplistic consumer-producer binary and offers a more nuanced and accurate account of Black girls’ media practices.
In the first chapter, I contextualize Black girls’ contemporary media engagements within historical constructions of girlhood in the United States, arguing that racially nuanced understandings of girlhood can lead to more expansive imaginings of what the Internet can do in the realm of social justice. The second chapter examines the Instagram posts of three celebrity Black girls to put forth a theory of Black girl semiotics. I use this theorization of Black girl semiotics to illustrate how Black girls can leverage social media to produce, control, and reclaim narratives about Black girlhood in ways that would not be possible through other mainstream media platforms. The third chapter analyzes the Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube activity of “everyday” girls. This chapter combines focus group data, interviews, and visual analysis to explore how the digital, physical, and conceptual layers of Black girls’ geographies affect their digital content. Finally, the fourth chapter presents Willow Smith’s Afrofuturist visual and sonic expressions as manifestations of free Black girlhood that function as a point of departure for imagining and constructing Black girl futures.
Ultimately, I conclude that Black girls’ digital media productions function both as sources of Black girls’ knowledge and artifacts of Black culture more broadly. Attending to how Black girls document, interpret, and share their experiences has significance not only for building the field of Black Girlhood Studies but also for the ongoing debates about practices of archiving, the role of digital media technologies in our everyday lives, and potentialities (and limitations) of digital media in social justice activism.
Subject (authority = local)
Topic
Black girlhood
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Women's and Gender Studies
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Digital media -- Social aspects
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Blacks -- Study and teaching
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
African American girls
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Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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ETD_9621
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1 online resource (ix, 199 pages) : illustrations
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
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rucore10001600001
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Identifier (type = doi)
doi:10.7282/t3-mgtr-jf38
Genre (authority = ExL-Esploro)
ETD doctoral
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Rights

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The author owns the copyright to this work.
RightsHolder (type = personal)
Name
FamilyName
Wade
GivenName
Ashleigh
Role
Copyright Holder
RightsEvent
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Permission or license
DateTime (encoding = w3cdtf); (point = start); (qualifier = exact)
2019-03-28 15:09:31
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Name
Ashleigh Wade
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Affiliation
Rutgers University. School of Graduate Studies
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Author Agreement License
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I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.
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Type
Embargo
DateTime (encoding = w3cdtf); (point = start); (qualifier = exact)
2021-03-17
DateTime (encoding = w3cdtf); (point = end); (qualifier = exact)
2023-05-31
Detail
Access to this PDF has been restricted at the author's request. It will be publicly available after May 31st, 2023.
Copyright
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Copyright protected
Availability
Status
Open
Reason
Permission or license
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