Black bodies, Black queens, and the Black sisterhood on social media: perspectives from young African women in Australia

ABSTRACT

African Australian diasporic literature has drawn attention to the highly racialised experiences that Black African women encounter living in bodies that are raced as Black in Australia. Within their (in)visibility and ‘otherness’ – they are looked upon in suspicion and yet also ignored, silenced and excluded. Their bodies are involuntarily marked as ‘deficit’ and ‘deviant’, resulting in disadvantage, alienation, and non-belonging. Through the theoretical lens of (in)visibility, we centre the racialisation of the Black African body as crucial to the digital practices that young Black African women in Australia engage in on social media. In drawing on a multi-method approach involving social media ethnography, the ‘scroll-back’ interview method, and sustained, ongoing dialogues on social media, this article explores the everyday social media practices of nine young Black African women in Australia. The findings indicate that social media is used to visibilise and (re)claim contemporary Black African womanhood, amongst a global digitally mediated community of Black African women. These, Black female-centred empowerment digital communities are important spaces in which young Black African women in Australia can unlearn, resist, and reject the harmful racialised ideologies that they have endured (and continue to endure) in white Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Black African women
• youth
• Australia
• social media
• digital platforms

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the nine African young people whose stories are at the centre of this paper. Thank you also to the two anonymous peer reviewers who provided kind and critical feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We intentionally capitalise the term Black throughout this paper to signify our reference to people who are raced as ‘black’, acknowledging the significance of Black embodiment on their shared experiences as a racialised ‘other’.

2 We use the term ‘Indigenous peoples’ acknowledging, in line with Frazer, Carlson, and Farrelly (2022) that there is no universally agreed upon terminology for referring to the many diverse groups who comprise the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across Australia.

3 The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) does not collect national data on race. Rather the category ‘place of birth’ is used to account for ‘ethnic’ diversity in Australia. Data on ‘place of birth’ does not translate into information about race, neither does it allow for data that stipulates the number of first-generation, Australian-born, African people. As such, we cannot say for certain the number of Africans in Australia who are raced as Black.

4 In Australia, the terms ‘Black’ or ‘Blak’ are commonly used as descriptors for Australia’s First Nations people, to examine their experiences and as a way of representing the racial divide between the Indigenous people of Australia and their colonizers (see for example: Foley 1999; Paradies 2006).

5 We use Colic Peisker and Tilbury's (2008) study on Indigenous Australians and African refugees to acknowledge how being racialized as Black/Blak in settler-colonial Australia oppresses and disadvantages. It is not our intention here to universalise a ‘Black experience’ nor make generalised arguments about blackness but rather to focus on interrogating blackness as it pertains to Black Africans and their experiences in settler-colonial Australia.

6 A bitmoji is a personal emoji that users create and then use on their various social media accounts (particularly Snapchat). The bitmoji is an expressive cartoon-like figure which can have different hairstyles, face-shapes, and outfits