ABSTRACT
There is a performative discourse of Black womanhood which produces an always already said about what a Black woman identity is, what culture and behaviour is entailed and what exactly is a Black woman. Black womanhood is a racialized gender knowledge which establishes differences that come then to be taken as givens. Power is also apparent as practices of naming/refusing to name deny any autonomy to the named. This chapter uses instances in talk of the construction of 'the authentic Black woman' in order to look at the process of identity positioning and re-positioning which occurs in talk-in-interaction. Through this process in the talk, it explores how Black women's identities are critical ontologies of the self. The chapter focuses on the agentic struggle involved in these ontologies against the governmentality of the discourse of 'the authentic Black woman' by looking at how this discourse itself is used to produce difference.
