MeTelling: Recovering the Black Female Body

Abstract

In this article, I explore undergraduate Black women’s collective and individual responses to the media’s depiction of Black women. Through participatory action research (PAR), participants created digital counter-narratives, which I refer to as MeTelling Narratives, focused on a particular stereotype in visual culture that is commonly ascribed to the Black female body. I used a mixed methods approach (i.e., rhetorical criticism, content analysis, and narrative inquiry) to study participants’ shared knowledge, beliefs, and identification with disempowering visual narratives of race and gender. In this PAR, the researchers create digital MeTelling Narratives that present complex relationship between cultural points of view and personal experiences.