In this dissertation I use Patricia Hill Collins' discussion of two Black feminist concepts, self-definition and self-valuation, as frameworks for interrogating Black women's word choices for naming, defining, and giving meaning to their identities specifically, and Black womanhood, generally. The purpose of this project was to better understand how Black women use their language power as a Black female literacy that allows them to resist, reclaim, and redefine misperceptions of Black female identities. Using a Black feminist methodological approach to grounded theory methods, I conducted a study with 12 self-identified Black women from diverse backgrounds. My methods for collecting data included pre-interview questionnaires, interviews, and a focus group drawn from a previous version of the study. Through these data collection methods participants shared specific words that represented their identities as Black women, and then used their voices, stories, and lived experiences to theorize and give meaning to their words. To analyze data, I used a series of coding to categorize participants' responses and locate common themes and patterns across all sets of data. My findings indicate that strong, loving and care, and sister were the most popular terms used by Black women in my study to describe themselves, influential Black women in their lives, and Black womanhood more generally. Given the historical images, stereotypes, and continued misrepresentations of Black womanhood within television, film, popular culture, and other spaces, I present participants' self-definitions and self-valuations of their identities here to offer real Black women's counter-narratives to myths about Black female identities. Through their counter-narratives Black women, individually and collectively, used their power over the word to reclaim, rename, and redefine Black womanhood(s) by themselves and for themselves.
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