"Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: African American Women, Material Culture, and Powers of Self-Definition"

Psyche A. Williams-Forson, "Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: African American Women, Material Culture, and Powers of Self-Definition." University of Maryland, College Park, December 2002.

Chickens have played prominent roles in the lives of African American women. This dissertation articulates the complexity of black women's legacies with food as a form of cultural work. Black women have employed chicken in myriad ways to provide for their families, shape a distinctive culture, define themselves, and exert agency in the face of...