BLACK MUSLIM WOMEN AND DIGITAL ENTREPRENEURIAL RESISTANCE: AN INSTAGRAM INFLUENCER CASE STUDY

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation is a qualitative analysis that draws upon case studies of three Black Muslim American woman influencers on Instagram: an entrepreneur, a lifestyle/fashion blogger, and a comedian. This case study research used content analysis and in-depth interviews to answer a primary research question: “How do Black Muslim women influencers use Instagram to share narratives that affirm the intersections of their racial, religious, and gender identities?” Findings revealed that Black Muslim women influencers use digital alchemy to combat symbolic annihilation. Black Muslim women influencers are engaging in digital entrepreneurial resistance—a term that describes the intersection of entrepreneurship and activism on a digital stage, where technology empowers commercial entities to innovatively resist structures of power or oppression. It was abundantly evident that while their Instagram pages were businesses, they were also means of portraying the true/authentic image of Black Muslim women in a world where dominant media has historically distorted, erased, and excluded the intersections of their identities. Their Instagram pages were used as ways to reclaim and proclaim their narratives through the use of intersectionality, technological affordances and attention economy, uses and gratification theory, and Black feminist standpoint theory. </p>