Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
Anthropology
Major Professor
Antoinette Jackson, Ph.D.
Co-Major Professor
Emelda Curry, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Tara F. Deubel, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Daniel Lende, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Michelle Hughes Miller, Ph.D.
Keywords
Military Culture, Critical Race, Gender, Trauma, Care, Community, Resources
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to emphasize notions of citizenship and accessibility as experienced by Black women Veterans. By expanding our worldview of Veteran identity, the ethnographic data demonstrate issues of displacement, alienation, and longing that contribute to the dissonance Black women Veterans rooted in the U.S. South may experience. To forge belonging through place-making, Black women Veterans may seek sisterhood by building sites of resistance in person or online. Findings are based on in-depth interviews with Black women Veterans and participant observation with community partners who service Veteran needs. Black women Veterans construct their identities often in oppressive circumstances and spaces, including within the very spaces that they seek to cope and heal.
This study advances theory on critical race, place-making, and somatic ReStorying to disrupt the myth of the hero that has been accepted as the singular Veteran narrative.
Scholar Commons Citation
Hemphill-Hodges, Meya J., "Beyond the Mask: Veterans Challenging the Strong Black Woman Trope in Their Journey to Heal in the South" (2024). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10630
