My dissertation analyzes everyday Black women’s sacred space-making practices and argues that they are sites of spiritual healing. I assert that in the wake of urban displacement, unhoused and housing-insecure Black women in Oakland, California, perform rituals of care within curated interiors of bodies and homes. I trace a collective praxis of ancestral memory and spirit reclamation that undergirds each space. Everyday art-making becomes a ceremonial act, and I illustrate how mundanemoments of hair braiding and home-making, within the confines of a tent or a stoop, hold ancestral and spiritual resonance. I argue that these women’s sense of their own interior divinity stakes claims to humanity amidst the dehumanization of urban placelessness.

The dissertation is based on five years of ethnographic research with sixty-five participants. My sitesof study range from living rooms to sister-circles and include a variety of spaces where Black women in Oakland find healing. Methodologically, I engage performance ritual as praxis. I develop decolonial methods that expand traditional approaches to anthropology by merging performance ethnography with poetics and creative arts to more fully encapsulate the nuances of Black women’s spiritual lives. I posit “Black feminist space making as methodology,” and I curate healing circles where participants produce art which becomes data for my research, with participant consent. These artworks, and the encounters they engender, contribute to an expansive ethnographic dataset. I link dissertation chapters with virtual curations that articulate my research findings through prose, poetry, and multimedia art. I offer multisensory experiences of my work, which enables liberatory theories to be legible for academic and nonacademic viewers, including communities that inform my project. My website, blackwomxnhealing.com/dissertation, serves as a home for these multimedia texts.

My project builds upon a genealogy of Black feminist anthropology to expand the ways we thinkabout reading, writing, and theorizing Black women’s intimate lives. I argue that, by excavating richly nuanced detail from the sacred lives of everyday Black women and “ordinary Black girls,” we expand our conception of feminist anthropology when conducted at the margins of the margins. By centering care practices of the uncared-for, and by illuminating the life-making praxis of women marked for social death, I work to reframe limiting notions of urban anthropology to shift the ethnographic gaze from a pathologized Black femme subject to a complexly curated and artfully autonomous one.

The consumer DNA ancestry testing industry was estimated to have served two million customers in 2015 (Nelson, 2016). DNA ancestry testing is permeating media outlets and proliferating in forms of social media and popular culture. Viewers see performances of genetic ancestry test results on news programs, talk shows, educational programming, and social media sites. Given how ubiquitous DNA ancestry testing is in American households, and how often test results are being shared on social media sites such as YouTube, I argue that we can use DNA test reveals to ascertain the way race is viewed, performed, and negotiated. My research asks, what do the social media performances of DNA Ancestry tests tell us about how test takers see race and ethnicity? Do test-takers change their identity affiliations or the ways they view themselves after reading the results? If so, do test-takers rely more on the genetic component of identity or are there other criteria that have more weight? The performative, dramatic nature of genetic results being read in front of an audience means we can use these reveals to understand what people consider the appropriate criteria to belong to an ethnic or racial group, and to see what conditions cause people to change identity or reject the test results.

2018 begins on very promising note for comic book fans, as the long-awaited Marvel Comics Black Panther film premieres in February. While Black Panther is the first black superhero comic character to appear in American comics in July 1966, and his stories are plentiful, the adventures of America’s first black superheroine are few and disparate. The appearance of “The Butterfly,” America’s first black superheroine is not as well-known and documented along with many other noteworthy black female superheroines in comic books. The black female superheroine’s narrative, a diverse and complex one, is slowly building traction and worthy of scholarly attention. Her narrative is crucial and significant to the overall story of American comics. Thus, examining various Black female superheroine stories offers an opportunity to (re)explore new identities and territories in comics, reframe our understanding of certain terminology and concepts, and most notably to empower the black female voice.