This session offers diverse womanist perspectives about embodied approaches to opportunities for wholeness while navigating tensions.
A burgeoning body of evidence documents how Black women in higher education are disproportionately impacted by adverse outcomes pertaining to their physical, mental, and social wellbeing as compared to their white counterparts in academe. While some research has examined why Black women exit the academy, far less attention has been paid to why Black women remain in institutions that are increasingly marked by epistemic violence, gendered racism, and unequal access to promotion. Bridging womanist thought with the Public Health Critical Race (PHCR) praxis of critical storytelling, this study draws on survey data and semi-structured interviews with womanist scholars at various stages of their careers (i.e., students, junior scholars, and senior scholars) to demonstrate how a sense of calling in the lives of Black women may function as a mechanism of self-sacrifice even as it is reconfigured as a weaponized tool of anti-Black violence in academe.
This paper argues that carcerality is a more adequate and generative theological metaphor than crucifixion for naming Black women's survival in America. Ignacio Ellacuría's "crucified people" and James Cone's theology of the cross are event-based, male-coded, and easily spiritualized into redemptive suffering. Drawing on Sarah Jobe's carceral hermeneutics, Hortense Spillers' analysis of the captive body, Kelly Brown Douglas's account of criminalized Black womanhood, and Sylvia Wynter's decolonial critique of the genre of the human, this paper contends that carcerality names what crucifixion cannot: a system of ongoing bodily confinement, intimate and gendered violence, and colonial construction that extends from the Middle Passage to the present. Working constructively within womanist theology, and grounded in Delores Williams's survival ethics and Katie Cannon's moral wisdom, the paper proposes a womanist carceral theology adequate to the task of dismantling, not merely enduring, the structures that confine.
This paper develops a womanist pastoral-theological framework for understanding Black women’s depression as a relational, embodied, and justice-related reality rather than an individual deficit. Based on my qualitative study of seven Black Christian women with persistent depression, it treats their narratives as theological texts and sources of wisdom. Combining trauma theory and ecosocial approaches with self-psychology and womanist theology, the paper interprets depression as a bodily response to multilevel trauma—historical, structural, communal, and personal. It critically examines controlling images such as the Strong Black Woman, Platonic body–spirit dualisms, and sacrificial atonement theologies that over-spiritualize mental health and sanctify Black women’s suffering. In dialogue with Alice Walker’s womanism and influential womanist theologians, it offers embodied reinterpretations of incarnation, the cross, and salvation that affirm Black women’s depressed bodies as sacred and deserving of care. Finally, it provides trauma-informed, practical recommendations for Black churches aiming to foster more just and liberating ministries.