Digital Dialogue: 'Deviant Black Bodies and Embodied Black Feminism in the Blogosphere'

Online space often operates within an invisible white universe with blackness becoming apparent only insomuch as it is rendered deviant. In a post-Cosby and Obama era of perceived post-raciality, black people are left to exist purely within the “dominant social imagination as media constructed stars and fantasy figures.” Black characters in popular culture thrive only insomuch as they propel the post racial fantasies of white America. Radhika Mohanram argues that the black body is only black when out of its place, for within context it is but a body. She goes on to point out from Fanon, that the black (wo)man exists to provide perspective rather than to she herself have perspective. A critical analysis of the digital culture of black and white feminist thought in Jezebel and For Harriet provides a site to examine what happens when the subject, the black body, at least temporarily does not exist as an ‘other’ but is squarely within a context that allows it to be merely a body.

Catherine Knight Steele is a native Chicagoan who received her doctorate in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2014. She previously served as an assistant professor at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on African American culture and discourse in mass and new media, and publications have appeared in the Howard Journal of Communications and Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online (Peter Lang, 2016). Her dissertation, “Digital Barbershops: The Politics of African American Oral Culture in Online Blog Communities,” explored the politics of African American blogs as contributing to online counterpublics and secondary orality. She is currently working on a monograph about digital black feminism and new media technologies. Steele will serve as the first Project Director of Synergies Among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture (AADHum).

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