Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Manship School of Mass Communication

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

This dissertation examines the visual erasure of Black Masking Indian Queens in New Orleans news media (1995–2025) by applying Black feminist theory, visual culture, and a mixed-methods approach. Study 1’s critical visual content analysis (N=276 images) quantified patterns: Queens were present in 19.2% but captured in the foreground only 35% of the time, named in 18% of captions, and placed in the background 65% of the time. However, the findings show that the Chiefs’ 89% dominated the foreground in 89% of the news images. These findings reveal hypervisibility as spectacle, invisibility as authority.

Study 2’s photo-elicitation interviews (N=5 Big Queens) yielded themes of cultural preservation, gender dynamics, ancestral connection, and erasure resistance. Queens contested in their interview responses contested media frames (“We sew the dreams they photograph”), claiming epistemic agency amid commodification, embodying oppositional gaze (hooks, 1992) and quotidian refusal (Campt, 2017).

Lastly, the findings demonstrate media hierarchies that privilege Chiefs and men of the tribes, yet Queens negotiate visibility through labor, which complicates the binary erasure and resistance. The implications urge journalism to build a relational ethics that understands the impacts of framing and visual culture, disrupts the systems that render Black women invisible, and advances visual communication and Black feminist scholarship.

Date

3-27-2026

Committee Chair

Winfield, Asha

LSU Acknowledgement

1

LSU Accessibility Acknowledgment

1

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Available for download on Saturday, March 27, 2027

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