Rejecting Archtypes: The Construction of Identity and Citizenship for Black Women During the Black Lives Matter Movement

Posted: 26 Oct 2015

Date Written: October 26, 2015

Abstract

This paper explores how the Black Lives Matters movement gives Black women a platform to express, interrogate, and complicate their perceptions of citizenship and identity within not only the movement but also national boundaries. It showcases how intersectional identities of Black women are being developed, scrutinized, and rejected in a movement that is becoming hypervisible in an attempt to disrupt public discourse around blackness, authority, freedom, and justice. Protests, rallies, and demonstrations in response to the rising visibility of police brutality to black bodies and black communities has served as a catalyst for Black millennials, particularly Black women, to engage and reconceptualize American citizenship. Founded by three Black Queer women, BLM has made a conscious effort not to reinforce hegemonic notions of gender, class, sexuality, and sexual orientation that previous racial equality campaigns, like the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, have adopted. Though BLM strives to create a space for Black women to acknowledge and integrate their experiences in response to the violence ascribed to black bodies, the rhetoric surrounding the movement devalues the voices and work these women have completed by appropriating language that reflects patriarchal perceptions of male superiority. By examining the responses to demonstrations that have occurred in the state of Alabama as well as on the campus of the University of Alabama, I will examine the strategies Black women use to construct a new vision of citizenship that is oppositional to the black masculine archetype of political leadership. I argue that Black women have used social media platforms such as twitter and blogs to engage in activism that resist hegemonic models of the ideal American citizen while simultaneously interrogating the social and political exclusionary methods used by the Black political establishment to uphold systems racial and national belonging.

Suggested Citation

Rogers, Elizabeth, Rejecting Archtypes: The Construction of Identity and Citizenship for Black Women During the Black Lives Matter Movement (October 26, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2680337

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