Kiara Childs
“Black Women’s Digital Feminism and Self-Advocacy: A Cross Platform Analysis of Black Women’s Beauty Culture.”
Specifically, I focus on Black women’s beauty content, including YouTube makeup tutorials and beauty challenges on TikTok and Twitter. Black women’s labor on these digital platforms joins an enduring history of beauty culture in the United States, which adds to and reinforces Black women’s discrimination and exclusion. Thus, this project contributes to an emerging field that examines the importance of Black women’s technology use and cultural production. My project makes interventions within the fields of feminist media studies, race and technology studies, and performance studies to argue that Black women are technical experts and reveal how Black women negotiate space and reimagine affordances on platforms that are not created with Black women in mind.