Misogynoir Transformed. Moya Bailey
web shows, and Tumblrs I describe in chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively, are all examples of generative digital alchemy in action.
Misogynoir without Borders
While the Internet has been celebrated for its ability to traverse national borders and make countries seem more porous through information exchange, social media platforms maintain demographic segregation that belies this perceived fluidity. I still find a US-centrism in the Black women’s digital media I examined for this project. While some of the tweets, videos, and Tumblrs come from English speakers outside the United States, the vast majority of the content available is created by Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks in the United States.
Additionally, the history of misogynoir I trace is contextualized through US chattel slavery and its afterlife.74 The examples of misogynoir I detail build on US history and inform the way misogynoir is manifest contemporarily in the digital spaces I examine. However, misogynoir’s virulence does not heed geopolitical borders. I am awed and saddened by the term’s uptake beyond the United States—awed that Black women and their supporters have found the word useful in a number of contexts and saddened that people find it necessary to use so frequently in all corners of the globe. I believe that those outside the United States are best positioned to speak about misogynoir—and hopefully its transformation—in their locations. I offer an invitation to readers to see this book as the first of many that address misogynoir in several arenas and locales, where I and other writers take on the unfortunate dynamism of this noxious reality. Trudy’s blog entries on misogynoir helped the term move through Internet spaces. Academics and activists in Europe, South America, Africa, and even Australia have found utility in the term.75 As recently as 2019, protests in Paris, France, and Johannesburg, South Africa, have included signs and chants decrying misogynoir.76 These uses of misogynoir and the resultant mobilizations to curb its effect on Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks deserve the proper framing that only folks directly engaged in these organizing efforts can provide. I see my work in conversation with as opposed to supplanting or superseding other work on the term, and I look forward to more work that challenges the roots of misogynoir in other locations.
Even my work on misogynoir is complicated by the fact that within a US context, Blackness is not a monolith. The tensions between Black Americans descended from enslaved Africans, Caribbeans descended from enslaved Africans, and more recent African immigrants disrupt any fantasies of an easily achievable pan-African united front against misogynoir. These intraracial fault lines are frequently part of the discussion of how misogynoir manifests, and I look forward to work by other scholars and activists who can address these tensions.
Transformation
Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed from one form to another.
—Law of conservation of energy
I titled this book Misogynoir Transformed because I could not let misogynoir go unmodified. A book titled Misogynoir on its own does not represent an action or protest. I did not want to simply explain or rehearse examples of misogynoir in a book-length project. I, like trans advocate Janet Mock, wanted an action to animate misogynoir, to signal my interest in its destruction. I did not want to account for all the vile and deleterious hate that is misogynoir without making clear that there are those of us working to transform it. Chapter 1 does take on this necessary project but also highlights examples that extend the possibility of misogynoir’s transformation. The idea of misogynoir being transformed, using that swirling mass of negative energy against itself to make something altogether different, inspires me.
“Embodied transformation,” a concept from the practice of somatics as rearticulated by organizer and facilitator adrienne maree brown in her book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, “‘is foundational change that shows in our actions, ways of being, relating, and perceiving. It is transformation that sustains over time.’”77 Transformation is achieved only when change is evident in the way we move through the world and how we continue to incorporate that change throughout time. When I talk of the transformation of misogynoir, I am interested in all of the ways that Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks work to transform the toxicity of these representations and images that cause them harm. While I hope for an eradication of misogynoir, I realize that a world without misogynoir requires more than the labor of Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks to be achieved. We can transform our relationship to misogynoir and transform the images and material consequences of misogynoir even as we are not the ones who create it. The transformation of misogynoir through the creation of new possibilities is an essential practice of the digital alchemy these communities engender. In the context of this book, I am looking at the digital tools that Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks employ to do this transformative work.
Transformation is also a key component of transformative justice, a liberatory approach to lessen harm and violence in society that does not center alienation or punishment as means of behavior modification. The now defunct social justice organization Generation Five, which described three essential elements of transformative justice, insisted that “the conditions that allow violence to occur must be transformed in order to achieve justice in individual instances of violence. Therefore, Transformative Justice is both a liberating politic and an approach for securing justice.”78 The transformation of misogynoir similarly requires a change in conditions, which includes the way that Black women are viewed in society.
What might seem difficult to understand is that my call for transformation is inclusive of those who cause harm by perpetuating misogynoir. Rather than punish or shame those who participate in the proliferation of misogynoir, transformation requires consequences for harmful actions. In the examples that follow, I go into detail about those who have used misogynoir to harm Black women and girls and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks, but I do not wish to punish them or cause them harm in return. For those willing to learn and understand why their behavior was harmful, this text can serve as an opening, a place to learn why their behavior was harmful and hopefully start them on a path to transform their behavior.
The transformation of misogynoir occurs in the types of content that creators produce and in the lives of the people involved in the production through their participation in the process. On one level, Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks are transforming the misogynoir they experience in digital spaces by refashioning these very same tools for their own ends. Misogynoir is transformed through new content creation. And while new content is being created, the process itself produces opportunities and experiences that also challenge misogynoir. Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks can experience an embodied transformation through their participation in creating digital media. Content creation provides opportunities for unique self-care and group-care practices such as building interdependent relationships and sharing resources. This creative process transforms racist, homophobic, transphobic, and sexist mainstream imagery through the generation of new content, while simultaneously fostering conditions that allow creators to experiment with practices that support their “physical, mental, and social well-being” outside the purview of the Western biomedical-industrial complex.79 While it may not be possible for Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks to eradicate misogynoir themselves, they can transform it and reduce the impact of its harmful effects in their lives through the digital alchemy they employ.
I see the digital alchemy that Black women engage on social media platforms as a form of harm reduction, given that this activism implicitly and explicitly challenges misogynoir. Harm reduction is an intervention strategy primarily associated with lowering the potential negative health outcomes of drug use, but the efficacy of the practice has led to its application in other contexts. It begins with the assumption that harm happens, but one can reduce harm by engaging in small transformative interventions. Black women’s digital activism is a form of harm reduction because it does not stop misogynoir, but it mitigates its harm through the promotion of images and narratives Black women want to see. Black women can create their own networks with which to affirm one another, challenge unjust policies, and create the kinds of