This post was written by Adjua Akinwumi, a PhD Mellon fellow on the Data Fluencies project at the Digital Democracies Institute.
For centuries, the science of alchemy sought to transmute metals. Its ultimate ambition was to transmute any regular metal into gold. Discussing her book ‘Misogynoir transformed’ in a recent visit to the DDI lab, Dr. Moya Bailey adopts this lens of alchemy to consider the transformative activism of Black women and Black non-binary, agender, and gender variant folx in digital spaces fueled by misogynoir. Digital alchemy, as she positions it, is a practice that involves actively reimagining the world via digital content creation. As alchemy, it “transforms everyday digital media into valuable social justice media that recodes the failed scripts that negatively impact their lives.” As such, it shifts attention away from misogynoir’s harmful representation in digital culture to the self-produced transformational images that disrupt mainstream narratives and minimize the harm of misogynoir in the process.
Bailey first coined the term misogynoir while working on her graduate dissertation at Emory University in 2008. As she explains, misogynoir is not “simply racism that black women encounter, nor is it the misogyny black women negotiate.” It captures a “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.” Through popular media and digital culture, misogynoir perpetuates misogynistic portrayals that shape the livelihoods and health of Black women – from the Jezebel to the strong Black woman archetype. Misogynoir as harmful representation cannot be divorced from its use to maintain white supremacist patriarchy by controlling how society views and relates to Black women. As Bailey explains, these caricatures “materially impact the lives of Black women by justifying their poor treatment.”
These false representations contribute to the hypervisibility of Black women in media and yet startling invisibility when they require life-saving attention. As Bailey highlights, the devaluing of Black women, evidenced by the disproportionate attention and demands for justice when they are violated, exploited, or killed, points to society’s systemic failure to recognize Black women as worthwhile subjects deserving of care and respect.
But who is impacted by misogynoir? And who is involved in its transformation? Whom does the term Black woman represent? The term Black woman is often conflated to mean CIS and straight women. This conflation excludes queer and trans Black women as well as nonbinary, agender, and gender variant Black folx “whose experiences of misogynoir are intimately connected with the misgendering of them,” Bailey states. Reflecting on what the term means today, Bailey posits:
For those of us on the margins of Black womanhood, woman is not what we name ourselves. Even as misogynoir colours our experiences of the world, it’s often those of us in the shadows of Black women who are the most engaged in the media projects that transform misogynoir…Black women, in the title of my text, affirms Black women’s centrality to the project of transforming misogynoir, even when it is not Black women or Black feminists who engage in the production of transformative media. To say it another way, not all of the Black digital alchemists that I highlight are women, and not all of them are feminists.
According to Bailey, digital alchemy, engaged in by Black women and Black non-binary, agender and gender variant folx, is a digital resistance through content creation. It’s a form of self-production that challenges problematic mainstream narratives and normative standards of bodily representation and health presented in popular and medical culture. This transformation is rooted in transformative justice, which is “a liberatory approach to lessen harm and violence in society that doesn’t center alienation or punishment as a means of behaviour modification.” It acknowledges the harm that has been done and seeks to redress it.
Bailey positions this digital activism as a form of harm reduction – it doesn’t stop the harm of misogynoir. Still, it lessens it by promoting other images and narratives of Black women. Through digital alchemy, Black women create networks that affirm one other, challenge unjust policies, and transform “misogynoir where they experience it by remixing it or creating something new entirely.”
Dr. Bailey’s work provides us at the DDI lab with an extremely utile lens to situate and think about digital activism. We look forward to engaging with her work further as we explore digital cultures in their varying facets.