Citing debates on essentialisation of blackness, this article assesses how—if at all—Black Panther projects black female empowerment.
Sibongile Mpofu
Sibongile Mpofu is a research fellow at Stellenbosch University, South Africa where she completed her PhD in 2017. She also lecturers at the National University of Science and Technology’s Journalism and Media Studies Department. Dr Mpofu has worked across different media in Zimbabwe, first as a junior reporter at Community Newspapers Group (CNG), then as business reporter at the then national news agency, Zimbabwe-Inter-Africa News Agency (ZIANA) and as Business Editor for the weekly Sunday News owned by Zimbabwe Newspapers Group. She has more than 14 years’ experience in journalism and the academy, and has over the years worked with media-related organisations such as Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, Zimfact, Humanitarian Information Facilitation Centre and Information for Development Trust, through writing and mentoring journalists. Her research interests are digital media and gender, communication practices online and political participation, feminist theories and feminist political thought, gender and intersectionality, strategic communications.
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey