Misogynoir Transformed. Moya Bailey
It was Dr. K who asked, “You are taking all the classes. Why not be a major?” When she put it that way, there was no room for rebuttal. But in truth, I was a willing convert, despite still having every intention of attending medical school—but that was not to be.
As a nineteen-year-old junior and then president of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance (FMLA), I showed the group Nelly’s music video for the song “Tip Drill,” which had started airing on the late-night television show Uncut on BET (Black Entertainment Television). The video featured, most memorably, a scene where Nelly slides a credit card down the crack of a Black woman’s butt. Our group decided to name him our Misogynist of the Month, not knowing that the Spelman Student Government Association had agreed to partner with Nelly and his foundation JesUs-4-Jackie to hold a bone marrow registration drive on our campus in an effort to save the life of his sister, who had leukemia.2
FMLA raised questions about the misogynoir in his video and lyrics, and when we heard that Nelly was invited to campus, it seemed only fair that we ask him about the way he represented Black women since he was asking us for our help. Nelly declined our offer to talk about his music. Instead, he went to the press, twisting the story such that it seemed that Spelman canceled the bone marrow registration drive because of the video, an assertion that many still believe today, though we orchestrated our own drive.3 The story garnered national and eventually international headlines, both praising and condemning Spelman students for daring to talk back to the music.4
It was a hard lesson in the hypervisibility and invisibility of being a Black woman.5 Nelly felt entitled to our assistance with saving his sister’s life but did not feel that he had to address us, the Black women who dealt with the fallout of his video and lyrics in our day-to-day lives. As young Black women, we felt the impact of the video and lyrics in the form of street harassment in the United States and abroad. We dealt with assumptions about our sexual availability to men in the form of unsolicited commentary on our bodies, on our clothing, and on our time. He used his celebrity, built on the bodies of Black women, to urge people to support an underappreciated cause, the health of Black women. Black women are far less likely to find a matching bone marrow donor than their white woman counterparts, in part because of Black people’s deep distrust of the systemic racism in medicine, which makes them less likely to volunteer to donate. What was not quite clear to me in 2004 was the irony of using a fame garnered through limiting representations of Black women while refusing to address that decision and also wanting support from those very same Black women.
I wasn’t quite able to connect the dots between popular media representations of Black women and my and other Black women’s experiences with discriminatory housing practices, intimate partner violence (IPV), street harassment, employment discrimination, and ill treatment from healthcare providers, but my interest in the role media plays in shaping the perceptions of Black women became all-consuming, such that the goal of becoming a medical doctor morphed into getting a doctorate to investigate the role that media representations play in the treatment of Black women patients by white doctors. I learned about the ways historical popular culture seeped into the consciousness of supposedly objective future physicians, which prompted me to consider how popular culture representations influence Black women’s treatment in society and medicine today.6
It was in writing that dissertation that I landed on the word “misogynoir” to describe the particular venom directed at Black women through negative representations in media. How do you describe the ways that Black women are uniquely denigrated because of their gender and race? I played with a couple of terms before landing on “misogynoir.” Initially, the term existed only in my dissertation until 2008, when I was invited to join the Crunk Feminist Collective (CFC), an online blogging community of feminists of color.
From 2008 to 2013, the CFC dominated the think piece blogosphere with insightful and pithy commentary on popular culture, primarily through the lens of hip hop feminism.7 At its height, the CFC blog was home to fourteen Black and feminist of color bloggers who wrote about the news of the day, paying special attention to highlight the intersection of race and gender in their writing.8 Founded by Black feminist scholars Brittney Cooper and Susana Morris, then graduate students at Emory University in Atlanta, the CFC bridged a seemingly contradictory love for crunk hip hop music that dominated the radio airwaves in the aughts and the feminist theory they were learning in grad school.9
The blog was a space for timely and incisive criticism, and my first post, “They Aren’t Talking about Me . . . ,” discussed my concern about my own apathetic response to “misogynoir” in music; it was the word’s first appearance outside my dissertation.10 Once I used the word, other members of the collective started to use the term and it appeared in more CFC posts. From there, some members of the blogosphere began to use it, but no one more compellingly than womanist blogger Trudy at her now sunsetted Gradient Lair.11 Her work introduced online communities to the word, and she deftly articulated its utility. Her work and others helped the term reach a wide range of audiences, including an international one.
When I coined the term, I did not expect it to go viral. In addition to appearing in the New York Times, Ebony, Essence, and the Washington Post, “misogynoir” has its own Wikipedia entry, which receives thousands of views every day. It is also referenced in numerous scholarly journal articles and monographs. The adoption of the term and its wide reach in digital spaces make further theorization of its use important for gender, critical race, and cultural studies audiences outside the academy. I hope that, in addition to creating a term that is useful, I have created a book that is useful to the communities with which I study. I hope that future efforts similar to the successful campaigns and actions I describe here will further improve the lives of Black women and their communities.
Introduction
What Is Misogynoir?
“Misogynoir” (pronounced mi-soj-uhn-nwar) is a term I created in 2008 to describe the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience, particularly in US visual and digital culture.1 Misogynoir is not simply the racism that Black women encounter, nor is it the misogyny Black women negotiate. Misogynoir describes the uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization.
The term is a portmanteau of “misogyny,” the hatred of women, and “noir,” the French word for “black,” which also carries a specific meaning in film and other media. French film critic Nino Frank coined the term “film noir” in 1946 to describe the gritty, cynical, and initially American movies that had unusually cruel themes for the time. The motion picture genre is characterized by its dark and sometimes sexually charged undercurrents; examples include films like The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Like “film noir,” “misogynoir” originally described American media but similarly grew to transcend borders to describe an unfortunately global phenomenon. Whether in film, television, or as I examine extensively in this book, digital media, misogynoir has found a home in each of the communication advancements of the last two centuries.
Misogynoir is perpetuated through popular media like cartoons, minstrel shows, yearbooks, television, movies, and even Facebook, the digital descendant of yearbooks.2 Black feminist theory clearly articulates the power of the image to serve the hegemony of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” by controlling the way society views marginalized groups and how we view ourselves.3 Black feminist theorist bell hooks discusses the importance of producing images that counter the normalizing force of stereotypes, but also exposes the danger of reactionary positive images that can constrain and confine. We need complex images that break the good/bad, white/Black dichotomy. As hooks offers in Black Looks, we should be “asking ourselves questions about what type of images subvert, pose critical alternatives, and transform our world views and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad.”4 Similarly, Patricia Hill Collins argues against “controlling images” that attempt to delimit the potential ways of being for Black women in the world.5
The media that circulate misogynoir help maintain white supremacy by offering tacit approval of the disparate treatment that Black women negotiate in society.