Dear Colleagues,

Black feminist scholars emphasize the relative invisibility of black women in media, regardless of their disproportionately high use of social media and consumption of entertainment. When we think of black women, we see them in everything—from being the highest educated group in America to being a consistent voting demographic in the last three major elections. Their presence is inescapable, but still somehow missing.

For this Special Issue, we invite submissions that reach beyond widely accepted cisgender heteronormative constructions of black womanhood including the changing nature of representations of black womanhood over the past few decades. Some questions to explore are: How do different media, including digital media, portray black women? What can be said about the representation of black women artists? How does sex work contribute to the discourse surrounding the hypersexualization of black women? Do black women exist in augmented reality? How does the performance of black womanhood intersect with other categories of identity? We are also interested in questions that deal with the racialized and sexualized labor of caring, silent classism in mainstream black social movements, black women and trauma, and black motherhood.

We invite you to critique, interrogate, and consider black womanhood in online spaces, television, film, popular culture, politics, journalism, art, and other experiences. Rather than simply describing a phenomenon, we encourage contributors to investigate both theoretical implications and the potential consequences within their respective disciplines and the broader international scholarly community.

We welcome any methodological approach from scholars across disciplines, including collaborators within and outside of their primary fields.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• intersectionality
• culture
• media
• digital media
• performance
• invisibility and erasure