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My ‘personal is political’: introducing Black Feminography

Thursday 4th May

Rachel Odufuwa presents as part of the Centre for Gender Studies Seminar Series – Spring 2023

 

This talk introduces Black Feminography as a method for understanding Black women’s experiences of oppression. Black Feminography, which combines Black Feminist thought and auto-ethnography, was employed for my master’s thesis to illustrate how my auto-ethnographic experiences were shared with other Black women whom I interviewed.

My MA thesis revealed that I was not alone in experiencing the construction of White standards of beauty as the ideal and finding my centre which involved resisting White standards of beauty; rather, other Black women went through these experiences too. Identifying these shared experiences revealed the importance of not detaching from the wider experience, which in this case was the Black female experience.

However, it was carefully emphasised within my MA thesis that we cannot generalise these shared experiences to all Black women because not all Black women personally experience the world the same way, as revealed in my findings. Nevertheless, I still maintain that there are structural conditions to which we are all limited, and it is the structural conditions (i.e., gendered racism or racialised sexism) which are always shared.

Biography

Rachel Odufuwa is an Associate Lecturer in Gender Studies and a PhD student at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on amplifying the voices of Black women to enable us to become agents of knowledge rather than objects of knowledge, which has historically been the positioning of Black women— specifically, my PhD research is seeking to amplify Black women’s voices concerning Higher Education decolonising agendas and to enable us to speak our truths about current decolonising agendas.

This is a free event on Microsoft Teams, hosted by the Centre for Gender Studies at Lancaster University.

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