Voice, Agency, and Black Womanhood: A Black Feminist Reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Select Works

Abstract

This study interrogates the interconnected configurations of voice, bodily and social agency, and Black female subjectivity across four foundational texts by Zora Neale Hurston: the novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), the ethnographic folklore compilation Mules and Men (1935), and the autobiographical narrative Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Utilizing Black feminist literary theory and intersectional frameworks pioneered by scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Barbara Smith, this paper traces how Hurston models discursive authority and resistance against overlapping matrixes of racial, patriarchal, and economic oppression. Moving beyond conventional critical binaries that prioritize political protest over cultural affirmation, this analysis demonstrates that Hurston constructs a distinct paradigm of agency grounded in linguistic mastery, the reclamation of physical movement, folkloric epistemologies, and narrative self-definition. By reading across genres integrating domestic fiction, rural anthropology, and self-mythologizing memoir the article highlights how Hurston crafts Black womanhood not as a site of perpetual victimization, but as a dynamic space of interiority, creative sovereignty, and political self-actualization.