An investigation into the mediated personae of Beyoncé, Michelle Obama and Serena Williams as ‘race women’, and their focalisation of the struggle to traverse constructs of racial and gendered identity in contemporary USA.

Abstract

This thesis investigates how prominent Black women figures leveraged their feminist agency and unparalleled cultural influence in ways that shifted debates about race, gender and intersectionality during the decade of the 2010s. Responding primarily to Black feminist and postfeminist scholarship, this research offers an extension of existing critical understandings of race womanhood as a framework through which such figures and their work to mediate knowledge about racial and gendered identity can be read. Building on Brittany Cooper’s conceptual positioning of race women as figures who have developed and rearticulated methods of Black feminist resistance through their dissemination of knowledge about race and gender, the thesis analyses the significance of the carefully mediated public personae of popular music artist Beyoncé, former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama, and tennis super-star Serena Williams. In doing so, it considers how far each has been understood as a race woman figure, examining the ways in which they became focal points in debates around Black womanhood and Black feminism during this period through their engagement with strategies of Black feminist resistance and their contestation of harmful constructs of racial and gendered identity in the United States. Furthermore, it considers how far we can read each of these figures to represent ‘alternative’ and positively coded images of Black femaleness by exploring the legacies of their engagement with such strategies in the arenas of American popular culture, politics and sport. The analysis outlined above is taken forward using a case study methodology that is informed by the work of Hazel Carby in her feminist conceptualisation and critique of race men. Carby’s use of cultural case studies to situate representations of Black masculinity within the historical paradigm of African American ‘manhood’ has been adapted here and taken forward as a valuable method of analysis that centres African American women’s histories and cultures in our critical engagement with questions of race, gender and intersectionality.

Date of Award	21 Apr 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Winchester
Supervisor	Jude Davies (Supervisor), Carol Smith (Supervisor), Daniel Varndell (Supervisor) & Matt Leggatt (Supervisor)