SET APART: AN EXPLORATION OF IDENTITY, SEXUALITY, AND LOVE FOR BLACK CHRISTIAN WOMEN
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Scholars in Black Studies and Religious Studies have developed a wealth of knowledge regarding how Black women have historically and contemporarily navigated Afro-Protestant church environments. They discuss how Black women use these environments to cultivate meanings of womanhood through church work, as well as how the sexual politics of these environments impacted notions of purity, modesty, and sanctification. This study builds on this by drawing on three social media-based content creators who are Black Christian women and target their content at a Black female audience. JC, NR, and KG are all aged 18-24, are currently students, and keep Christianity at the center of their content. Their Black female identities are salient in their content, as is derived from their use of phrases and descriptors specifically related to the Black experiences. Between the three of them, I watched 123 total videos from their publicly available profiles on YouTube and Tik Tok. I extracted themes of sexual conservatism, purity, modesty, abstinence, self-love, and validation to make an argument that they rely on these things to cultivate meanings of Black womanhood in a contemporary landscape. These women overwhelmingly agree that sexual purity and modesty are what sets them apart from general society, also holding that valuing such things is the outcome of first pursuing close communion with God. They also make stern declarations that self-love is a biblically backed command, arguing that in order to love others properly it is required to love themselves. The unique experience of Black womanhood informs their attitudes toward validation. As Black women, they describe pressure to always look put together or present to the world in a certain way, which led them to seek validation from others rather than God and themselves. All these experiences are what they describe as characterizing Black Christian womanhood, and they use their social media platforms to communicate this to their audiences.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2023 |
| Publication date | June 12, 2023 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Rockett, Daryn |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | Black Women |
|---|---|
| Subject | Christian life |
| Subject | Afro-Protestantism |
| Subject | Identity |
| Subject | Sex customs |
| Subject | Validation |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Rockett, D. (2023). SET APART: AN EXPLORATION OF IDENTITY, SEXUALITY, AND LOVE FOR BLACK CHRISTIAN WOMEN . Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/qt185vr3018. https://doi.org/10.25740/qt185vr3018.
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses in African and African American Studies, Stanford University
View other items in this collection in SearchWorksContact information
- Contact
- drockett@stanford.edu
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...