Becoming the ‘Mothers of Civilization’: Constructing Black beauty and sartorial modesty in the Nation of Islam

Agency versus Insurgency

One of the striking plays by a black female writer, Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus is analyzed through Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) in this study. Inspired by a brutal historical reality, Parks (re)positions black women in the patriarchal and racist system. Her black woman, Venus, is objectified through her body, while she also struggles to be the subject of her own inner world. Focusing on the playwright’s discourse, this study sheds light on the complex relationship between discourse and gender through FCDA. Its main concern is that gender is discursively constructed based on ideological and political factors. It claims that discourse justifies and perpetuates gender-based discrimination, resulting in strengthening the patriarchal system at a linguistic level. Based on FCDA’s principles, this study infuses that Parks’s discourse of positioning the black female body as an object of male domination is constructed to reflect power relations, which systematically oppress black women. Relatedly, this study suggests that Parks’s discourse in Venus illuminates the pervasive nature of the objectification and exploitation of the black female body and dismantles historical and societal realities through the systemic oppression and marginalization that black women have faced. By exposing these deep-rooted power imbalances based on white hegemony and patriarchy, Parks’s discourse challenges the longstanding societal norms that have subjugated black women for centuries.

Since this country’s founding, women of color have had little control over their reproductive freedom. In 1973 two young African American girls, ages fourteen and twelve, were forcibly sterilized in the state of Mississippi. The lawsuit that followed brought national attention to the issue of coercive sterilization in the United States. This paper explores the development of the definition of reproductive rights and pays particular attention to black women's experience of reproductive rights starting with the introduction of birth control into the national discourse by Margaret Sanger and contamination of this discourse by theories of eugenics and decisions of the national government in cases such as Buck vs. Bell. With the introduction of coercive sterilization into national tactics for population control, birth control became a dubious topic for African Americans and negatively impacted black women's experience of birth control. I explain how these policies affected black organizations' views of birth control and women's roles within the civil rights and nationalist movements. This paper centers on the discussion and policies of organizations such as the Nation of Islam, NAACP, Black Panthers, SNCC and black women's responses to these attitudes. The infringement upon black women's reproductive rights ultimately led to the creation of a more comprehensive definition of reproductive rights by black feminist organizations and a demand for policies and attitudes that would take black women's unique perspectives into consideration. Author’s Note Stephanie Flores is a second year teacher at Achievement First Endeavor Middle School in Brooklyn as part of her commitment to Teach For America. Stephanie graduated from the University of Chicago in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in history and visual arts. While at the University of Chicago she concentrated in 20th Century American History with an emphasis on the study of women and people of color. For this work she received honors in her program. In her free time she enjoys exploring New York’s vibrant art and food scene.

This Article challenges a relatively universal judicial and societal assumption that employers’ enactment and enforcement of grooming codes are inconsequential to women’s access to, and inclusion in, American workplaces. Specifically, this Article provides a multidimensional analysis of workplace grooming codes, shedding light on the comparable journeys of discrimination that Black and Muslim women experience when their hair and hair coverings are subject to employer regulation. Further, it illustrates that since Black and Muslim women’s identities are not mutually exclusive, Black women who are Muslim may also suffer a double form of discrimination if an employer bans both hijabs and natural hairstyles in the workplace. Thus, for the first time, this Article specifically contemplates the interconnectivity between the socio-politically constructed identity of Black and Muslim women, the socio-political and personal meaning of Black women’s natural hairstyles and Muslim women’s hijabs and resulting discrimination — under the law and in society. In so doing, this Article illuminates how these women, who are racialized as non-white due to their physical appearance and/or their religious faith and observances, share similar experiences as it relates to workplace inclusion and exclusion vis a vis what adorns their heads. This Article also demonstrates that workplace prohibitions against Black women’s natural hairstyles and Muslim women’s donning of a hijab are closely aligned forms of race and gender-based discrimination, triggering parallel actual as well as perceived stigmatization, vulnerability, and exclusion for these women of color, which civil rights constituencies have not fully exposed and addressed. This Article draws upon the works of notable critical race and sexuality theorists in its contention that a “multidimensional” analysis of the discrimination that women of color as a collective experience in the workplace — at the intersection of race, religion, and gender — is vital for a deeper understanding of the civil rights issues at stake, as well as for increased and sustained civil rights advocacy challenging the legality of such grooming codes. Thus, this Article calls for cross-cultural advocacy among civil and workers’ rights constituencies so that antidiscrimination law, doctrine, and advocacy can more meaningfully attend to the deprivation of equal conditions, privileges, dignity, and personhood that Black and Muslim women suffer due to the arbitrary enactment and enforcement of workplace grooming codes banning natural hairstyles and hijabs in the workplace.

This article presents an ethnographic case study of Sunni women at The Muslim Center in Detroit, Michigan, regardless of any previous affiliation with the Nation of Islam (NOI). African American Muslim women, both those in the NOI and those outside it, navigate an intersectional space where their race, culture, and identity intersect with their faith. Often converts, these women have chosen a religion that resembles the Victorian framework of the Cult of Domesticity. Similar to how the Cult of Domesticity was created to give women an equally important yet complementary role during America’s early years, the tenets of piety, purity, submission, domesticity, and, for Black women, racial uplift define the identity of Black Sunni women. Rather than seeing these ideals as oppressive, Black Muslim women embrace them, actively embodying their faith, cultural identity, and lived experiences, providing them a voice and status within their families and communities. It is easy to view Victorian gender ideals as oppressive and limiting from a modern perspective. However, these ideals aimed to recognize and crystallize women’s significant impact on their families and communities. Without their piety, purity, domesticity, submissiveness, and dedication to racial uplift, the sweeping social movements that have fundamentally changed the nation might not have occurred. Women used the power given to them under the Cult of Domesticity to occupy two seemingly incongruous spaces: private, submissive nurturers and public, assertive leaders for change. Similarly, African American Sunni women harness the power of Islam to do the same.

Basing principally on Fairclough's theory of Critical Discourse Analysis (2001) and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (1994), Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis was initiated in “Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis - Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse” by Lazar (2005) is developed into a discourse research approach that sheds interest on the relationship between gender power and language or language use. Following this research approach, this paper outlines a detailed study of the grammatical features of journalistic discourse written about women in Vietnamese Women Newspapers, issues of 2021, from the perspectives of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, of which the grammatical features of journalistic discourse would be expressed in three aspects: experiential, interpersonal, and expressive values. More specifically, the experiential values of grammar were reflected in the transitivity processes, the interpersonal values were shown in modes of sentences, and finally, the expressive values were realized in the expressive modality. The study results revealed that the three most frequently used processes were material, relational and verbal. Besides, declarative sentence type was used most frequently, and there was very little likelihood of modal word use. These grammatical features were consistent with the news genre applied for newspapers while remaining ample contextual conditions for reflecting journalists' perceptions of women and feminism.

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life

Black beauty culture developed in the context of widespread disparagement of black men and women in images produced by whites, and black women’s exclusion from mainstream cultural institutions, such as beauty contests, which defined beauty standards on a national scale. Though mainstream media rarely represented black women as beautiful, black women’s beauty was valued within black communities. Moreover many black women used cosmetics, hair products and styling, and clothing to meet their communities’ standards for feminine appearance. At the beginning of the 20th century, the black press, which included newspapers, general magazines, and women’s magazines, showcased the beauty of black women. As early as the 1890s, black communities organized beauty contests that celebrated black women’s beauty and served as fora for debating definitions of black beauty. Still, generally, but not always, the black press and black women’s beauty pageants favored women with lighter skin tones, and many cosmetics firms that marketed to black women sold skin lighteners. The favoring of light skin was nonetheless debated and contested within black communities, especially during periods of heightened black political activism. In the 1910s and 1920s and later in the 1960s and 1970s, social movements fostered critiques of black aesthetics and beauty practices deemed Eurocentric. One focus of criticism was the widespread black practice of hair straightening—a critique that has produced an enduring association between hairstyles perceived as natural and racial pride. In the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, African migration and the transnational dissemination of information via the internet contributed to a creative proliferation of African American hairstyles. While such styles display hair textures associated with African American hair, and are celebrated as natural hairstyles, they generally require the use of hair products and may incorporate synthetic hair extensions. Beauty culture provided an important vehicle for African American entrepreneurship at a time when racial discrimination barred black women from other opportunities and most national cosmetics companies ignored black women. Black women’s beauty-culture business activities included beauticians who provided hair care in home settings and the extremely successful nationwide and international brand of hair- and skin-care products developed in the first two decades of the 20th century by Madam C. J. Walker. Hair-care shops provided important places for sharing information and community organizing. By the end of the 20th century, a few black-owned hair-care and cosmetics companies achieved broad markets and substantial profitability, but most declined or disappeared as they faced increased competition from or were purchased by larger white-owned corporations.

Academic journals serve as a discipline’s official discourse reflecting what has been deemed important in that discipline at a specific point in time. For the better part of 20 years, discourses in the field of student affairs have constructed Black men as a population in need of specific attention. The proliferation of scholarship on Black men and a surface examination of quantitative data have left many with the impression that Black women students are succeeding. This study problematizes the assumptions regarding the status of Black undergraduate women by examining how the population is discursively represented in higher education journals and how those representations impact discourses of student affairs practice. To answer these questions, the study uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine the use of textual silences to construct a narrative of the experiences of Black undergraduate women. This approach centers the role of language in the process of social practices and the maintenance and reproduction of societal power imbalances (Gavey, 1989). The analysis of data in this study resulted in three major themes describing discourses of Black undergraduate women: (1) persistence in the face of adversity, (2) preeminence of interdependent relationships, and (3) Black women as race plus gender. Broad implications from this study directly relate to the need for more varied, nuanced, and intersectional literature addressing the needs of Black undergraduate women. Furthermore, there is a call for student affairs practitioners to critically engage with academic journals as they seek to inform their practice and journal producers to consider the diversity of perspective and encourage innovation in the review process.

The context of the study is the ongoing protests and demonstrations by women in many places in Iran. The aim of this study is to examine gender ideology and power in Sahebjam’s Stoning of Soraya M. Qualitative descriptive method is used to investigate the relationship between gender ideology and power relations and how it creates power imbalance between men and women in Iranian society. The primary data source for this research is a novel, Stoning of Soraya M by Freidoune Sahebjam, which was first published in September 12, 1990. Data are analyzed through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis approach, more specifically, Lazar’s Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (2007). The findings of the study suggest that the country's laws, including the Constitution, the Civil Code, and the Criminal Code create a complicated legal environment for women. While the Constitution guarantees equal civil rights for men and women, religious law superseds other laws and is frequently abused by individuals to commit crimes against women. This study reveals how gender ideology and power relations regarding women reflected through discourse can demonstrate how women are treated in different parts of the world.Keywords: Gender Ideology, Power, Novel, Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis

Black American women are exposed to mainstream beauty standards, which may have implications for body image satisfaction. Given that beauty standards are often based on idealized depictions of White women’s physical features, scholars have called for body image research that extends beyond body type/weight (e.g., skin tone/hair) to better examine the experiences of Black women. In examining body image satisfaction and protective factors (e.g., ethnic identity), empirical research has yet to attend to these experiences at the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender. An online survey was used to examine whether womanist consciousness (WC) was a protective factor for Black American women ( N = 211). Findings indicated that after controlling for ethnic identity, higher womanist consciousness significantly predicted higher body satisfaction with historically racially defined features (e.g., skin tone/hair) and lower self-ideal discrepancy. Darker skin tone was linked to higher body importance and higher ethnic identity level. Last, increased frequency of wearing hair weaves was associated with lower body satisfaction while more frequently wearing Afrocentric hair styles/textures was associated with higher body satisfaction.

This article outlines a ‘feminist critical discourse analysis’ at the nexus of critical discourse analysis and feminist studies, with the aim of advancing rich and nuanced analyses of the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining hierarchically gendered social orders. This is especially pertinent in the present time; it is recognized that operations of gender ideology and institutionalized power asymmetries between (and among) groups of women and men are complexly intertwined with other social identities and are variable across cultures. Gender ideology and power asymmetries in late modern societies also have become increasingly more subtle and, at the same time, as a result of backlash against feminism, have re-emerged with a new blatancy. The article offers a rationale for highlighting a feminist perspective in CDA, and proposes five key principles for a feminist discourse praxis. In concluding, a brief analysis and discussion of some data on postfeminism is provided, illustrating some of the current concerns in feminist critical discourse analysis.

Michelle M. Lazar (ed.), Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, power and ideology in discourse. Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xi, 260. Hb $75.00.As the title suggests, this is a collection of feminist work carried out within the paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which Michelle Lazar glosses in her editor's introduction as “a critical perspective on unequal social relations sustained through language use” (p. 1). It does not seem to be a goal of the book to develop a distinctively feminist variant of CDA, or to engage in dialogue with its leading theorists (most of whom are men, and tend to be politically pro-feminist but not deeply influenced by feminism in a theoretical sense). Rather, contributors use established CDA methods to address questions about gender as one case of “unequal social relations sustained through language use.” That in itself is not a new endeavor – gender features as one topic in most books and edited collections of CDA, and it is also the theme of numerous journal articles – but this, perhaps surprisingly, is the first book-length volume specifically dedicated to the subject.

Book Review| July 01 2019 Black Women, the Nation of Islam, and the Pursuit of Freedom through the Promise of Patriarchy Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Erik S. McDuffie Erik S. McDuffie University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Civil and Human Rights (2019) 5 (1): 80–84. https://doi.org/10.5406/jcivihumarigh.5.1.0080 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Erik S. McDuffie; Black Women, the Nation of Islam, and the Pursuit of Freedom through the Promise of Patriarchy. Journal of Civil and Human Rights 1 January 2019; 5 (1): 80–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jcivihumarigh.5.1.0080 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Civil and Human Rights Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Black beauty is a complex cultural construct that transcends aesthetics to embody identity, resistance and political agency. This Special Issue explores how Black beauty culture, historically rooted in rich African civilizational practices that integrated physical appearance, spiritual health and social status, has been reshaped through experiences of marginalization, commodification and cultural appropriation. The evolution of Black beauty reflects a continuous negotiation between imposed Eurocentric ideals and Indigenous practices that celebrate natural features, such as kinky hair and darker skin tones, as expressions of resilience and self-worth. From early entrepreneurial pioneers like Madame C. J. Walker to the contemporary digital landscape where augmented reality and social media influence beauty standards, Black women have redefined beauty as an act of resistance against historical and ongoing exclusionary practices. Drawing on frameworks from Black feminist thought, critical race theory and postcolonial analysis, the articles in this issue critically examine how beauty practices are intertwined with race, gender and class while interrogating the dual pressures of commercial exploitation and cultural reclamation. This collection also highlights how beauty is politicized in media and fashion, contributing to empowerment and systemic marginalization. Ultimately, this Special Issue invites readers to reconsider dominant beauty narratives by centring on Black women’s lived experiences, celebrating their transformative impact on global beauty standards and recognizing beauty as a dynamic site of cultural resilience and sociopolitical resistance in today’s society.