Semester of Graduation
Spring 2026
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in American Studies
Department
Interdisciplinary Studies - Norman J. Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Dr. Griselda Thomas
Second Advisor
Dr. Miriam Brown Spiers
Abstract
Abstract
Through critical analysis of media: literary works, performance, and television, this thesis explores the prejudices, silencing, dehumanizing, sexualization, and marginalization of Black women, their bodies, identity, and trauma inflicted by White-authored texts, specifically the American canon. I analyze the works of Black women authors, scholars, and activists, who counter the false representation of the patriarchy. Their literary works refute, deconstruct, and redefine the canon’s distorted, racial and gendered stereotypes, later to be named controlling images. While narrating the Black woman’s authentic self, experience, body, and womanhood they reclaim space, authenticity, and agency.
In my research and analysis, the central ideology is Toni Morrison’s ideology, New World Black Woman. Morrison argues the New World Black Woman has the desire for freedom and choses whether to have responsibilities or not. For this thesis, my primary focus for representation of Morrison’s New World Black Woman, I examine Sarah Baartman (historical context) and Josephine Baker. I also examine characters Sula Peace, from Morrison’s novel Sula, and Olivia Pope, the protagonist from the television series Scandal, created by Shonda Rhimes. I found these women and characters align with the New World Black Woman ideology and were determined to challenge respectability politics. However, I must mention, not every woman shows to defy patriarchal and communal systems, cultures, norms, and behaviors.
Keywords:
Stereotypes, controlling images, respectability politics, patriarch, New World Black Woman (NWBW), desire, freedom, agency, self-representation, agency, autonomy, self-defining