Triple Consciousness: The Reimagination of Black Female Identities in Contemporary American Culture

Abstract

My article underscores the intermediate existence of black American women between race and gender by stressing the role white patriarchy and black hypermasculinity play in the marginalisation of black female voices and the prioritisation of white women’s interests within and beyond mainstream feminist spaces. In order to legitimise this intermediate existence of black women, my article develops the triple consciousness theory (TCT). Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, TCT argues that black women view themselves through three lenses and not two: America, blackness and womanhood. Black feminists, TCT affirms, are able to reimagine misguided narratives of black womanhood in contemporary American culture by unpacking the complexity of this threefold consciousness. In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay strives for the inclusion of pluralist voices in the mainstream feminist movement and in Lemonade, Beyonce uses Afrofuturist tropes, reappropriation and gothic imagery to exorcise the generational pain of betrayal by black men and white women. With Insecure, Issa Rae radicalises feminist theory by critiquing archetypes attached to black womanhood and in Marvel’s Black Panther, not only do black women possess the unprecedented agency to shape their own identities on their own terms, there is also an existential reconnection with their past.