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Black Women’s Digital, Creative, and Cultural Industry Experiences
Abstract
This chapter focuses on Black women’s contemporary digital, creative, and cultural industry experiences. It reflects on the overlap between tacit issues concerning racial, gender, and cultural identity in online spaces, and tensions between the emancipatory, enterprising, enjoyable and extractive dimensions of the digital experiences of Black women in Britain—which are inevitably impacted by capitalist infrastructures. This chapter addresses how labour is (un)defined and understood in society, in ways influenced by social hierarchies and structural exploitation linked to anti-Black racism, sexism, classism and different interlocking oppressions. Traumatic aspects of Black women’s digital experiences are discussed, as well as the endeavours of self-serving and institutionally racist arts organisations that attempt to ‘diversify’ their brand image by spectacularising Black people.
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Purpose: This paper aims to explore how and why ideas regarding “intersectional” approaches to feminism and Black activism are drawn on in marketing content related to the concept of being “woke” (invested in addressing social injustices). It considers which subject positions are represented as part of this and what they reveal about contemporary issues concerning advertising, gender, race and activism. Design/methodology/approach:
This study involves an interpretive and critical discursive analysis of so-called feminist advertising (“femvertising”) and marketing examples that make use of Black social justice activist ideas. Findings:
Findings illuminate how marketing simultaneously enables the visibility and erasure of “intersectional”, feminist and Black social justice activist issues, with the use of key racialised and gendered subject positions: White Saviour, Black Excellence, Strong Black Woman (and Mother) and “Woke” Change Agent. Research limitations/implications:
This research signals how brands (mis)use issues concerning commercialised notions of feminism, equality and Black social justice activism as part of marketing that flattens and reframes liberationist politics while upholding the neoliberal idea that achievement and social change requires individual ambition and consumption rather than structural shifts and resistance. Practical implications:
This work can aid the development of advertising standards regulatory approaches which account for nuances of stereotypical representations and marketing’s connection to intersecting issues regarding racism and sexism. Originality/value: This research outlines a conceptualisation of the branding of “woke” bravery, which expands our understanding of the interdependency of issues related to race, gender, feminism, activism and marketing. It highlights marketing responses to recent socio-political times, which are influenced by public discourse concerning movements, including Black Lives Matter and Me Too.
This volume offers a critical, cross-disciplinary, and international overview of emerging scholarship addressing the dynamic relationship between race and markets. Chapters are engaging and accessible, with timely and thought-provoking insights that different audiences can engage with and learn from. Each chapter provides a unique journey into a specific marketplace setting and its sociopolitical particularities including, among others, corner stores in the United States, whitening cream in Nigeria and India, video blogs in Great Britain, and hospitals in France. By providing a cohesive collection of cutting-edge work, Race in the Marketplace contributes to the creation of a robust stream of research that directly informs critical scholarship, business practices, activism, and public policy in promoting racial equity.
We, Moya Bailey and Trudy aka @thetrudz, had significant roles in the creation and proliferation of the term misogynoir. Misogynoir describes the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience. Despite coining the term in 2008 and writing about the term online since 2010, we experience, to varying degrees, our contributions being erased, our writing not cited, or our words plagiarized by people who find the word compelling. It is not surprising that misogynoir would be enacted against the Black women who brought the word to public acclaim but it is nonetheless troubling. This is not to say that every time the word is used, our names need to be mentioned, but it does matter that our intellectual interventions are understood in proper context. In this article, we interview each other and discuss the ramifications of the naming of misogynoir in digital media and its impact on our own lives.
The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist context, the political rise of fascistic movements has intensified across the globe. Our collective provocation here is that this current conjuncture cannot be explained with reference to the exceptional intrusion of racism, nor the epiphenomenal status of race in relation to political economy. Instead we attend to how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally reproducing raced markets and social conditions. Our Introduction opens this conversation for New Political Economy readers, positioning neoliberalism and the current conjuncture as the present political economic moment to be understood through a raced market frame of analysis. Our hope is that this special issue will be read as a timely intervention, referencing a long tradition of (often marginalised) thought which attends to race as productive and material, rather than confined to the ideological realm.
For African Americans, the legacy of oral communication within the community is being transferred to online spaces. Blogging provides a platform with features that mirror many of the components of the Black barbershop. The barber and beauty shop symbolize a space of retreat, wherein African Americans have formed alternate publics used to critique the dominant culture, foster resistance, and strengthen African American institutions. Analysis of nine African American–authored blogs using a method of critical technocultural discourse analysis demonstrates that each blog used traditional Black rhetorical strategies while making modifications to contemporary goals. The strategies involve modifications made to traditional Black humor and folktales. The writing style is highly performative, yet relies upon participant interaction. This reliance on orality is a necessary force in the maintenance of cultural traditions that have long worked to assist in group definition and acts of resistance in political power struggles. By utilizing modified song, narrative, and fables to articulate resistance and craft African American identity, African American online oral culture persists as a strategy to house political discourse within the often hidden enclave spaces of the digital barbershop.
This article critically analyses the manner in which intersectionality and related social positionality shape digital enterprise activities. Despite popular claims of meritocratic opportunity enactment within traditional forms of entrepreneurship, ascribed social characteristics intersect to influence the realisation of entrepreneurial potential. However, it is purported that the emerging field of digital entrepreneurship may act as a ‘great leveller’ due to perceived lower barriers to entry, disembodiment of the entrepreneurial actor and the absence of visible markers of disadvantage online. Using an interpretivist approach, we analyse empirical evidence from UK women digital entrepreneurs which reveals how the privileges and disadvantages arising from intersecting social positions of gender, race and class status are reproduced online. This analysis challenges the notion that the Internet is a neutral platform for entrepreneurship and supports our thesis that offline inequality, in the form of marked bodies, social positionality and associated resource constraints, is produced and reproduced in the online environment.
Race and racism persist online in ways that are both new and unique to the Internet, alongside vestiges of centuries-old forms that reverberate significantly both offline and on. As we mark 15 years into the field of Internet studies, it becomes necessary to assess what the extant research tells us about race and racism. This paper provides an analysis of the literature on race and racism in Internet studies in the broad areas of (1) race and the structure of the Internet, (2) race and racism matters in what we do online, and (3) race, social control and Internet law. Then, drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, including Hall’s spectacle of the Other and DuBois’s view of white culture, the paper offers an analysis and critique of the field, in particular the use of racial formation theory. Finally, the paper points to the need for a critical understanding of whiteness in Internet studies.
Marketing blackness, or black cultural identity, involves promotional strategies reliant on persons and other symbolic and material representations socially and historically constructed as black (e.g. speech and phonetic conventions, folklore, style, fashion, music, usage of the body, and the black physical form). This research presents a framework that assesses the strategic role blackness representations play in US advertising. The framework addresses the fundamental question of how advertisers use blackness representations to deliver promises about their products' benefits, a necessary first step in ultimately understanding their effectiveness and their impact on blackness itself. The framework orders blackness representations along two dimensions of meaning based on the central claims made in advertisements: (1) claims about the product/brand as a cultural resource, and (2) claims about the viewer that emphasize themes of similarity or difference. The framework also specifies a range of advertising strategies reliant on blackness representations located along the two dimensions. I suggest that the time has come to change the focus of research on blackness representations from numeric representation and role status to understanding their role in promotional strategy more broadly, particularly in branding.
A dominant theme of recent critical analysis of digital media, user-generated content and cultural industries is that they involve unpaid work ('free labour') on the part of participants. This theme has been developed alongside other critical studies of labour in the cultural and IT industries, which focuses more on professional and semi-professional work. Critiques of free labour have provided some stimulating and necessary interventions against complacent celebrations of cultural-industry work, and of the relations between production and consumption in the digital era, but some significant conceptual issues concerning capitalism, exploitation, power and freedom remain underexplored. In addition, these critiques potentially serve (unintentionally) to marginalise the political importance of the conditions of professional cultural labour. After locating the critiques of free labour in the context of autonomist Marxist thought, the article a) argues that the frequent pairing of the term 'free labour' with the concept of exploitation is unconvincing and rather incoherent, at least as so far developed by the most-cited analysts; b) explores what political demands might and might not coherently be derived from critical accounts of free labour (and argues that the internship system is by far the most significant example of free labour in the contemporary cultural industries; c) assesses a previous critical attempt to address questions of unpaid labour, involving the concept of the 'audience commodity', and judges that it takes a much more pessimistic view of populations than that of free labour, but shares a lack of engagement with lived experience and political pragmatics; d) argues for the continuing political importance of the conditions of professional cultural production, against the implicit marginalisation of that importance in some versions of the free labour debates, and summarises conclusions from some recent research on the subject. Critiques of creative labour in the digital era Cultural industries and cultural production have been the subjects of thousands of studies. But until recently, only a very small proportion of these studies focused on the creative labour that is fundamental to this realm of production. The forgetting or devaluation of work in analyses of cultural industries has taken a number of different forms. One, apparent in some arts and humanities studies, is a focus on individual producers rather than on the complex division of labour, which, as the sociology of culture has shown (in valuable accounts such as Becker, 1982; Wolff, 1993), is the basis of most cultural production. Another is an emphasis within certain schools or traditions, notably some types of cultural and media studies, on consumption, at the expense of production.
How do Black women engulf themselves in the politics of being and becoming through everyday existence, aesthetics and media practices in creative, pleasurable, diasporic and resistant ways? How is the hegemony of North America, Eurocentrism, anti-Blackness and sexism implicated in this? We consider such questions in relation to Black women's media and aesthetic practices, and their related scholarship, by examining the Ghana-based web series An African City. Our work echoes calls for the decentering of media and communication studies rooted in white and Western perspectives but positioned as “universal.” We explore Black women's experiences (in Britain, the United States, Ghana, and Nigeria) as active producers in their communities; beyond the dominant epistemological hierarchy of whiteness in contrast with Blackness. Framing visual communication as a community-based source of self-expression, we emphasize the liberatory possibilities of aesthetics (fashion and screen depictions) for Black women, while tarrying with how capitalism constrains such radical potential.
This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed digital technologies, Black-authored websites, and Black-dominated social media services such as Black Twitter. Distributed Blackness also features an innovative theoretical approach to Black digital practice. The book uses libidinal economy to examine Black discourse and Black users from a joyful/surplus perspective, eschewing deficit models (including respectability politics) to better place online Blackness as a mode of existing in the “postpresent,” or a joyous disregard for modernity and capitalism. This approach also adds nuanced analysis to the energies powering Black online activism and Black identity.
This article argues that it is remiss to understand the acute intensification of White supremacist politics in contemporary Britain without paying close attention to how this racism is inherently gendered and sexualised. This will be discussed in relation to the gendered racism of ‘misogynoir’ as experienced by the British Member of Parliament Diane Abbott. The article uses Shirley Anne Tate’s powerful analysis of the Sable-Saffron Venus in the English imaginary to argue that forms of British, and more explicitly English, national identity have been worked out on the back of systemic efforts to erase the material and epistemic presence of Black women in Britain from the British body politic. It further argues that the politics of erasure extends to the epistemic elision of Black British feminist theorising within the field of social theory. What then are the consequences and interplay of both the lived and epistemic acts of violence? I explore these issues by mapping Black British feminism’s anticolonial politics to argue that we should bring this tradition to bear in our analysis of this most recent iteration of racism in our contemporary times.
Digital remix culture is enabling people to express how they feel about politics and society in a way that was not possible before the internet. Politicians, policymakers and others committed to progressive social change should take heed of this culture in terms of what they can learn from it and how they can protect people from its most harmful effects
Based on analysis of 23 interviews, this paper examines how social media and online content is implicated in the collective, resistant and transnational media experiences of Black women in Britain. It contributes to scholarship concerning race and the virtual marketplace by examining tensions between the countercultural, communal and commercial qualities of Black women’s online experiences. Drawing upon theorising of the oppositional spectator gaze of Black women, and narratives of technology consumption, we unpack how Black women’s digital activity can enable them to navigate the hegemony of US content, their marginalisation in British mass-media, and situate them within a Black experience that transcends Britain’s borders. Our work illustrates how Black women’s online encounters can be a source of resistance, Black digital commentary and community, as well as being subject to corporate co-optation. We conceptualise such online experiences as being shaped by transnational dimensions of the relationship between race, media and markets.
This book explores the practices and the politics of relatable femininity in intimate digital social spaces. Examining a GIF-based digital culture on Tumblr, the author considers how young women produce relatability through humorous, generalisable representations of embarrassment, frustration, and resilience in everyday situations. Relatability is examined as an affective relation that offers the feeling of sameness and female friendship amongst young women. However, this relation is based on young women’s ability to competently negotiate the ‘feeling rules’ that govern youthful femininity. Such classed and racialised feeling rules require young women to perfect the performance of normalcy: they must mix self-deprecation with positivity; they must be relatably flawed but not actual ‘failures’. Situated in debates about postfeminism, self-representation and digital identity, this book connects understandings of digital visual culture to gender, race, and class, and neoliberal imperatives to perform the ‘right feelings’.
Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, and media studies.
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
Studies of race and media are dominated by textual approaches that explore the politics of representation. But there is little understanding of how and why representations of race in the media take the shape that they do. How, one might ask, is race created by cultural industries?
In this important new book, Anamik Saha encourages readers to focus on the production of representations of racial and ethnic minorities in film, television, music and the arts. His interdisciplinary approach combines critical media studies and media industries research with postcolonial studies and critical race perspectives to reveal how political economic forces and legacies of empire shape industrial cultural production and, in turn, media discourses around race.
Race and the Cultural Industries is required reading for students and scholars of media and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in why historical representations of 'the Other' persist in the media and how they are to be challenged.
Online abuse has become an everyday occurrence for women politicians. Asmina Dhrodia explores the 2017 General Election campaign and argues that failure to tackle this urgent problem will have serious consequences both for women now, and in generations to come.
Race is a marketplace icon. How so? By holding true to an icon’s defining characteristics: high visibility, divisiveness, and uncritical devotion. In this brief musing, we describe how despite its centrality to market activities, race is uncritically addressed in academic marketing research. We next introduce the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) Research Network, a newly-formed interdisciplinary collective of scholars and scholar-activists that seek to break race of its iconic standing and bring greater equity to markets by disseminating critical, collaborative, and transdisciplinary race-based market research that supports liberatory public policies and community actions. We close with a call to join our effort to reimagine the marketplace through the critical examination of what has been a perpetually overlooked icon in marketing academia.
Social media platforms are important to self-employed cultural workers as a means of reaching markets and promoting the entrepreneur’s brand identity. But beyond self-branding, how are notions of expertise negotiated by individual cultural entrepreneurs and how does this relate to gender? This article addresses issues of identity and professionalism for women cultural entrepreneurs by focusing on their use of Twitter. Given the well-documented gender and ethnic inequalities in cultural industry work, what does women’s use of Twitter tell us about the nature of women’s professional identities within neoliberal economies? We argue that online platforms are an important space for self-employed cultural workers and that within this context, ideas of femininity and entrepreneurship are entangled. The article concludes by discussing the value of examining social media spaces as a means of exploring the presentation of women’s expertise in a post-feminist era.
This book uses the experiences and conversations of Black British women as a lens to examine the impact of discourses surrounding Black beauty shame. Black beauty shame exists within racialized societies which situate white beauty as iconic, and as a result produce Black 'ugliness' as a counterpoint. At the same time, Black Nationalist discourses present Black-white 'mixed race' women as bodies out of place within the Black community. In the examples analysed within the book, women disidentify from both the iconicities of white beauty and the discourses of Black Nationalist darker-skinned beauty, negating both ideals. This demonstration of Foucaldian counter-conduct can be read as a form of disalienation from the governmentality of Black beauty shame. This fascinating volume will be of interest to students and scholars of Black identity, Black beauty and discourse analysis. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018. All rights reserved.
YouTube and video bloggers (vloggers) have been a source of academic interest, yet few studies explore the representation or experiences of Black women on YouTube. The video blogs (vlogs) of Black women yield symbolic digital resources which young Black women may engage with in self-exploratory, self-educating, resistant and collective ways. This article reflects on 21 in-depth interviews with young Black women in Britain, aged 19–33 years. It addresses how their engagement with Black women’s vlogs intersects with identity and ideological work, including participation in Black digital diasporic dynamics. Influenced by research about Black women and media culture, resistant YouTube activity, as well as race and everyday uses of celebrity, this article explores the YouTube usage of young Black women in Britain, while reflecting on what this reveals about their lives in the early 21st century. This article forms part of ‘On the Move’, a special issue marking the twentieth anniversary of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Book synopsis: A lively and informed reflection on the experience of black people in Britain. The varied experience of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, with its difficult and fractured history, is reflected in this distinctive and lively collection. The contributors to Inside Babylon show how employers and police, psychiatrists and welfare services, help to channel black people into residential and occupational ghettoes. Clive Harris, Bob Carter and Shirley Joshi analyse the economic destiny of Afro-Caribbeans in Britain. Going beyond the familiar prisms of race relations and reductionist class analysis they illuminate the radicalizing dynamic of British capitalism in the postwar period. Errol Francis provides a shocking account of the experience of black people at the hands of psychiatrists in Britain. Cecil Gutzmore finds the Notting Hill carnival to be a litmus test of racist formations in both the media and the state, as well as evidence of the resilience of the black community. Amina Mama and Claudette Williams explore the position of women in black communities while Gail Lewis focuses on their characteristic patterns of employment. In a powerful concluding essay Winston James charts the unfolding of a new Afro-Caribbean identity in Britain and debunks the notion that racist structures by themselves create a homogeneous black community. Inside Babylon is a radical and timely indictment which moves beyond over-simplified and misleading stereotypes to identify and explore the impressive struggles of black people of Britain.
This article analyzes African American–oriented blogs for their potential to foster varying kinds of alternate publics while engaging in discourse that is outside what is commonly considered political communication. Bloggers and their communities use satellite and enclave spaces to explore black representation in art and media, black feminism, and class consciousness. I use critical technocultural discourse analysis to explore the affordances and constraints of blogs in creating alternate publics for African Americans online. Capitalizing on African American oral culture, black bloggers can use spaces technically accessible to the masses, yet keep discourse hidden, intentionally opting out of engagement with the dominant group. Expanding sites of inquiry and bringing a historical understanding of offline patterns of communication allow for more rich, useful, and culturally responsible research into the online communication African Americans and other marginalized communities.
Skin bleaching/lightening/toning, a transracial multi-billion-dollar global enterprise, involves transnational pharmaceutical/cosmetics companies and local entrepreneurs. About 15 % of the world’s population consumed skin lighteners in 2014, with sales projected at US 19.8 billion dollars by 2018 (Neilson 2014). Japan is the largest market and pills, potions, creams, soaps, lotions, suppositories, injections, lasers and intravenous drips are global lightening technologies. Irrespective of its globality and transraciality, skin bleaching/lightening/toning as pathological sticks to African and African descent women’s skins whether poor ‘bleacher’ or ‘celebrity lightener/toner’ because of colourism and post-enslavement’s skin colour preferences for lightness/whiteness. As consumers, women enter the global market in lightness in a beauty culture which negates the racialised gender power relations and social structuration of colourism, positioning bleached skin as ‘post-Black feminist’. Specifically bleached skin counters second-wave Black feminism’s embrace of Black anti-racist aesthetics’ ideology of ‘naturalness’. This epistemological break challenges hegemonic Black feminist aesthetics as well as denoting a new racialised aesthetic sensibility in the contested ‘post-race’ afterlife of 1970s Black feminism as it comes up against neoliberal discourses on individualism, choice and empowerment (Gill and Scharff 2011). For some, going beyond the politics of ‘natural skin’ reproduces post-feminist Blackness as a site of political vulnerability when skin is devalued by bleaching/lightening/toning. However, I will argue that bleachers’ readings of the global skin trade do not mean that they have fallen prey to white supremacy as they ‘shade shift’. Instead, this change is a critique of existing pigmentocracy enabled by their post-Black feminist self-positionings.
There is a contradiction at the heart of digital media. We use commercial platforms to express our identity, to build community and to engage politically. At the same time, our status updates, tweets, videos, photographs and music files are free content for these sites. We are also generating an almost endless supply of user data that can be mined, re-purposed and sold to advertisers. As users of the commercial web, we are socially and creatively engaged, but also labourers, exploited by the companies that provide our communication platforms. How do we reconcile these contradictions? Feminism, Labour and Digital Media argues for using the work of Marxist feminist theorists about the role of domestic work in capitalism to explore these competing dynamics of consumer labour. It uses the concept of the Digital Housewife to outline the relationship between the work we do online and the unpaid sphere of social reproduction. It demonstrates how feminist perspectives expand our critique of consumer labour in digital media. In doing so, the Digital Housewife returns feminist inquiry from the margins and places it at the heart of critical digital media analysis.
This study explores Black British women's motivations for divulging racial and ethnic identity in the blogosphere (sometimes referred to as blogging while Black) and their use of blogs for discursive activism. It builds on previous research that gives voice to Black womens marginalized experiences through powerful counter narratives. The blogosphere is often perceived as a racially neutral space where shared interests across geographical and temporal boundaries limit the significance of racial and ethnic identity. However, the constructed narratives of Black British women in this study highlight their experiences of subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination perpetuated through dominant discourses in the mainstream media. The findings demonstrate how they use blogs as a medium for discursive activism to challenge stereotypical raced and gendered representation in the mainstream media. Much of the research on the blogosphere in Britain reflects its use by the White majority population. This study therefore extends understanding of the blogosphere and highlights alternative modes of political communication.
This book investigates the constraints and freedoms of cultural work and, in particular, the ways in which different sociological traditions have sought to theorize the cultural industries workplace and the creative cultural worker. It is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the varied critical theory, governmental and liberal-democratic approaches to cultural industries labour. Perhaps most notably, the book revisits and develops Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on social ‘practices’ in order to frame a new analysis of apparent emergence of ‘re-moralized’ cultural labour.
Social media has taught me more about black British history than I ever learned in school-and that’s a crying shame
- Paula Akpan
They aren’t talking about me …’ Crunk Feminist Collective
- Moya Bailey
The Black Press in Britain
- Ionie Benjamin
Consumer Equality: Race and the American Marketplace (Racism in American Institutions)
- Geraldine Henderson
- Rosa
‘In our own words: organising and experiencing exhibitions as Black women and women of colour in Scotland
- Hill
- Francesca Sobande
White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue… and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation
- Lauren Jackson
- Michele