Autonomous Women

I am in the process of revising my article “The Emotional Toll Tax: A Decolonial Feminist Study Examining How Childfree, Never-Married, Single Women of Color Navigate Work, Success and Health.” This article focuses on how childfree, never-married, single women of color navigate the social institution of work, labor, and their personal lives from a Decolonial Feminist perspective. I introduce my concept emotional toll tax, which combines two preceding ideas, Hochschild’s Emotional Labor and Armour’s Black Tax. My data establish how childfree, never-married single women of color are able to negotiate life by challenging normative gender roles and pursuing financial independence. I highlight four key findings: 1) women of color’s childhood experiences shape their views on work and employment; 2) financial stability creates the opportunity for more independence; 3) their decisions about how and where they work are connected to feeling accepted and valued as women of color; and 4) they prioritize their mental health and redefine the notion of success. 

I am also revising a paper that examines the roles of single women characters in movies. Movies portray women who live a single life, outside the perimeters of the wife and mother paradigm, in ways that reveal social perceptions society has of these women. Film, as an extension of and an accompaniment to culture, continuously creates, defines, and redefines gender and accompanying gender norms and generational expectations. I performed a content analysis of the portrayal of single women in film with single women as main characters. The films span multiple decades and genres from a mock-documentary, femme-fatale thrillers, romantic comedies, female "buddy" films, and coming-of-age films. I included films with cultural diversity, representations of women of color, and more typical single-white female films. I used an inductive, narrative inquiry approach through a feminist lens to analyze themes from twenty films that have single women as main characters. I hope to have a revised version of this paper out for review by the end of 2025.

The article “The Love Jones Cohort and Singlehood are Family Court Issues” with co-author Dr. Kris Marsh was published in October 2024 in the Family Court Review journal https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/fcre.12817. This article reviews the changing Black family and households. The core theme is to understand the uniqueness of those single and living alone in the Black middle class—the Love Jones Cohort—and how their intersecting identities of race, class, gender, and singleness inform their lifestyle, shape how they manage life decisions, and their relationship to policy as well as family court. This essay moves beyond the popularized and omnipresent inquiry: “Why are Black women notgetting married?” or “Why are there so many single professional Black women”? This line of questioning throws the spotlight squarely on Black women’s individual dating practices, while often ignoring structural factors that undergird those decision-making processes. It implies that because of the individual actions of the Love Jones Cohort, specifically Black women, they are somehow at a deficiency if they are not married and child-free rendering them invisible as a family. This article discusses the legal implications of the presence of the Love Jones Cohort. 

The first paper from my dissertation is “The Feminization of Freedom: An Analysis of Love, happiness, and Freedom from the Perspective of single, never-married, childfree women of Color" has been published in the Journal for Social and Personal Relationships https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02654075241269667

This article addresses singleness as a state of being and not a transition for single, never-married, voluntarily childfree women of color. As the characterization of adult romantic relationships has evolved, the meaning of singleness has also transformed. My research applied the theoretical frameworks of feminist standpoint theory and decolonial feminism through an intersectional lens to explain how women of color experience love and relationships in a non-traditional way and how they create a singular corridor that allows them to exist on the boundaries of heteronormative marriage and romantic love. In this article, I argue that these women have a unique positionality in society. They are women who have remained free from the heteronormative obligations to a husband or children, and they are also women who have not had the privileges of some of their white counterparts.

My article with co-authors Dr. Stokes and Ms. Brito “Framing Onscreen Sexual Misconduct: #MeToo as a Cultural Place Card," is currently under review as a revise and resubmit. This article investigates how cultural intermediaries write about film and television content in the wake of #MeToo. We used a content analysis of news media coverage to assess how cultural intermediaries interpret and evaluate on-screen representations surrounding gender and sexual misconduct, supplemented with an analysis of films and television programs referenced in news stories. The findings show that #MeToo is used as a cultural place card for situating, evaluating, and framing film and television. We found that these frames align with three prominent values: feminism and EDI, creative freedom, and hegemonic gender. Our findings contribute to research on the impacts of #MeToo, the evolving relationship between popular culture and social change, and intermediaries’ role in shaping public perceptions.

My article “We Come Not Here to Talk’—Revisiting the Work of Anna Julia Cooper: An Analysis of Standpoint Theory and Her Placement in the Academic Canon" was published in the Symbolic Interactionism journal. In this paper, I detail how Cooper’s analysis of group identity located in shared experience provided the groundwork for intersectional frameworks and feminist standpoint theory. I further contend that Cooper's lived experience narrative informed her work and the work of others of her time, including the more esteemed W.E.B. Du Bois. My analysis examines how the work of theorists of color is often omitted, erased, or contextualized within the writings of white theorists due, in part, to a lack of generational intellectual wealth, a concept I coined to recognize the historical discrepancy in scholarship between white scholars and scholars of color and how that exclusion has shaped and defined established knowledge. This paper won the 2023 Dalhousie University’s John Flint Prize for Best Paper.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.632.