Misogynoir Transformed. Moya Bailey

by making them uniquely susceptible to abuse within the system.

      The life of Henrietta Lacks offers an example of Black women’s historical lack of agency in negotiating how representations of themselves are used. Lacks’s biopsied cancer cells, later dubbed “HeLa cells,” were the first to survive and grow outside the human body. They became the engine behind much of twentieth-century science and medical innovation, including the polio vaccine and some early investigations of humans’ ability to survive in space. Yet Henrietta Lacks died at the young age of thirty-one, leaving a husband, children, and extended family who have never been able to fully access the mental and physical healthcare they need.41 Moreover, neither Lacks nor her husband gave permission for her cells to be used for research purposes. Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which famously chronicles the story of HeLa, attempts to shed some light on the current situation of the family, but their reality is overshadowed by the success of the cells and Skloot’s book itself. As in the case of Betsy, Anarcha, and Lucy before her, Henrietta Lacks’s health needs mattered only insofar as they were connected to larger scientific needs, interests, and goals. Her image circulates on the cover of Skloot’s book, but the book does not question the scientific racism and sexism that shaped her early death. Black women’s bodies have been instrumental in the development of medical and scientific breakthroughs that have aided countless humans across the globe. However, the degree to which these advancements have helped the health and well-being of Black women remains unclear. This unsatisfying reality is misogynoir.

      These historic abuses and others perpetrated by medical and political forces are now a part of a national narrative about Black people’s troubled relationship to healthcare. They affect the willingness of Black patients to seek treatment and color how Black people, Black women in particular, are treated in society.42 The sociocultural factors that helped engineer these systemic practices of mistreatment are beginning to be theorized, along with the activism of Black women that works to counteract them.43 With the rise of social media, Black women are in an even better position to challenge the stereotypes that negatively impact their health and well-being. Black feminist theorists have hinted at the connections between representations and health for decades, calling for systemic changes in both media and medicine to ameliorate the disproportionate health burden Black women negotiate. Black feminist scholars Dorothy Roberts, Alondra Nelson, Harriet Washington, Imani Perry, Farah Griffin, Angela Davis, Sabrina Strings, and Rana Hogarth are just a few who have done the labor of putting into book form the cost of representation on the lives of Black women.44 The path from stereotype to structural oppression, poor health outcomes, and ill treatment in society is still obscured.

      In this book, I argue that Black women’s digital resistance, through the creation of new content and digital practices, is a form of self-preservation and harm reduction that disrupts the onslaught of the problematic images that society perpetuates. Misogynoir impacts so many different facets of Black women’s lives, but health—Black women’s very right to life—is an essential vantage point from which to gauge its deleterious effects. While memes circulate through social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and others that depict Black women as more ugly, dirty, deficient, hypersexual, and unhealthy than their white or non-black women of color counterparts, Black women employ these same platforms in ways that subvert negative stereotypes through processes that can be their own health-affirming practice.45 Simply put, both the process of creation and the material created are co-constitutive harm-reduction strategies. Misogynoir Transformed examines the social media activities of Black women as one way that they are attempting to redress the negative impact of stereotypes in their lives and on their health.

      This book is not a history of misogynoir. Rather, I conceptualize the alternate representations created by Black women as counterpublic productions that trouble stereotypical depictions and as vehicles for processes that allow for other types of health interventions. I use multiple case studies that explore Black queer and trans women’s digital resistance on social media platforms to illustrate the ways redefining representation empowers media creators to tell another story about their lives—one that is sometimes in reaction to mainstream narratives that distort their realities, but is also visionary in terms of evoking the kinds of realities they wish existed.

      Misogynoir can be weaponized against Black women in ways that harm their health. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”46 This definition has been criticized by disability studies theorists for making health unobtainable for those who do not have “complete physical, mental and social well-being.” By definition, those who use wheelchairs, manage their depression with medication, or have mental and/or physical impairments, chronic illness, or disease fall outside the scope of “complete physical, mental and social well-being.” As a scholar of disability, race, and gender studies, I also question how “complete physical, mental and social well-being” can be achieved if one lives in a neighborhood with little access to fresh food or ways to safely exercise. Race and gender not only play a role in the physical environment in which one lives but also impact the way one is perceived in society. Can a person achieve the WHO definition of health if they encounter racism, sexism, ableism, and other oppressions as part of their daily life in the world? The stress and material consequences of systemic oppression make it nearly impossible to have physical, mental, and social well-being in a white supremacist patriarchal country.

      For the purposes of this book, I use the WHO definition of health to orient readers to the myriad ways misogynoir has material effects in the lives of Black women and expand our general thinking of health beyond statistical disparities. Misogynoir may impede Black women’s health by negatively impacting their physical, mental, and social lives. As Color of Change senior campaign manager Brandi Collins acknowledges, “There’s so much research out there showing that there are consequences for Black women when these stereotypes are allowed to rule the day. It’s tied to diminished economic opportunities, less attention from doctors, stricter sentencing from judges.”47 As the first half of this introduction details, misogynoir also shaped US domestic policy, the buying and selling of goods, and even the development of healthcare procedures. The impact of misogynoir on the lives of Black women cannot be overstated.

      Misogynoir through Media

      There remains a belief that recognizing the misogynoir experienced by Black women detracts from efforts to support Black men and boys. In the wake of seasons of unarmed Black men being gunned down by police, instances of Black women’s murders at the hands of the police have not evoked the same demands for police accountability.48 The Boston activist and 2020 poet laureate Porsha Olayiwola’s poem “Rekia Boyd” asks the question why no one showed up for a rally in Boyd’s honor following her slaying by off-duty police officer Dante Servin over an alleged noise complaint:

      Last night

      No one showed up to march for Rekia Boyd.

      Rekia was shot dead in the head by cops on Monday.

      A cook county judge acquitted Dante Servin, went jailbird free

      Rekia Boyd was a 22-year-old unarmed Black woman who had been living on the south side of Chicago and last night no one showed up to march at her rally.

      I guess all the protestors got tied up.

      I guess all the Black folks were busy making signs saying, “Stop killing our Black boys!”

      I guess no one hears the howling of a Black girl ghost in the night time.

      We stay unheard.

      Blotted out.

      Buried.

      Dead Black girls receive tombstones too soon and never any flowers to dress the grave so we fight alone.49

      Olayiwola describes the disproportionate attention Black men and boys get when they are violated and the absence of similar demands for justice when a Black woman is killed. I argue that the silence and erasure of the violence Black women and girls endure are connected to society’s inability to see them as worthwhile subjects deserving of respect and care, a sentiment