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.

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.