Abstract
African American studies have increasingly contributed Internet theories to better understand how oppressive systems that influence Black people’s lives are intertwined with the proliferation of information and communication technologies. Black feminist thought, in particular eschews positivism, showing how the media maintains anti-Black misogyny through controlling images that legitimize Black women’s exploitation. In this vein, Bailey’s 2021 Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance analyzes how Black women, non-binary, agender, and gender-variant people generate new digital content and practices in reaction to problematic images for self-preservation and harm reduction. Social media platforms play a key role in this dynamic, providing means for innovating narratives about the realities of Black women and allow them to combat oppression and construct support networks that challenge misogynoir. The book draws from Africana studies, women, gender, and sexuality studies, digital humanities, and the social sciences to explore YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr. The book begins with a description of misogynoir, followed by four chapters on new media representations of Black people. The conclusion explains how Black people have affected society and digital culture as Internet users and what this implies when new social media platforms arise.
Bailey, an associate professor in Northwestern University’s Department of Communication Studies, contextualizes her argument with Black feminist thought in the book’s introduction.
According to Bailey, anti-Black misogyny encourages racist and sexist violence caused by intersecting oppressions. As part of US digital and visual culture, the media perpetuates representations of Black women as animalistic and abnormal relative to White women. This chapter outlines how these representations influence Black women in policy, health, and media. Bailey asserts that in reaction to misogynoir, Black Internet users perform digital alchemy, which takes defensive and generative forms, to “create better representations for those most marginalized” (p. 24). The introduction stresses the intricacies of understanding digital culture, particularly regarding how marginalized groups enact it in ways not represented by new media studies’ dominant concepts and frameworks. Through navigating these complexities, Black women, transgender, and non-binary femmes transform society in unique ways by using their digital practices to shape their real-world experiences and open up new opportunities for self-definition and self-valuation. In chapter 1, Bailey uses the metaphor of dragging to show how digital media reinforces the controlling image of the Sapphire, which portrays Black women as hyper-aggressive and needing control. In addition, Bailey explains how Black women and girls use defensive digital alchemy to react to viral videos that depict caricatures of their femininity and physical assaults on their bodies through digital media practices like hashtags and smartphone videos. Chapter 2 addresses how the #GirlsLikeUs and #FreeCeCe initiatives use Twitter hashtags to network and advocate for trans women experiencing injustice. Bailey asserts that these hashtags show how Internet users may cultivate digital initiatives that foster solidarity to confront injustice for everyone, particularly when centering Black trans women. In chapter 3, Bailey focuses on how Black queer women produce YouTube web series that relate to their specific challenges and well-being, namely Skye’s the Limit, 195 Lewis, and Between Women.
According to Bailey, these programs challenge misrepresentations or erasures of Black lesbian, bisexual, and queer women through generative digital alchemy, but they may also promote misogynoir, especially through the stud-femme dichotomy in queer intimate relationships. This observation reveals that transforming misogynoir can’t be neatly defined as Black feminist or Black queer liberation projects. Chapter 4 explores how Black nonbinary femmes Danielle Cole and Antoinette Luna Myers use Tumblr to build an online community they expanded into an offline network at the Allied Media Conference. Bailey shows how both users use Tumblr for affirmation, learning, self-care, and mental health among an online community that in many ways differs from the cisheteronormative spaces they occupy offline. In addition, Cole and Myers share their visions for how digital media platforms could better protect and support marginalized users. Bailey concludes by highlighting how Black women and girls employ digital alchemy as acts of reclamation. Still, according to Bailey, the same online tools that may empower Black women and girls can also be used to hurt them. Thus, Bailey envisions a “Black queer feminist future” that combats misogynoir using digital alchemy to create virtual space for marginalized people.
Overall, the book takes the typical approach of most contemporary Black feminist intellectual projects, building an argument about controlling images and how marginalized people challenge them, especially in relation to cishet Black men’s comedic caricatures of Black women and recordings of Black women and girls being subjected to corporeal violence. The book challenges both the deficit framework of race and technology and the erasure of race in mainstream Internet and cyberfeminist studies. Each chapter is exemplary for new media researchers who want to include Black feminist thought or intersectionality to understand the digital practices of marginalized Internet users. Misogynoir Transformed shows how race, gender, and sexuality shape digital media content and online networks. This book is essential for anybody analyzing the Internet within new media studies, African American studies, Black feminist thought, Black queer theory, and gender studies. Bailey asserts that this work indicates that digital resistance among Black women offers “a form of self-preservation and harm reduction that disrupts the onslaught of problematic images that society perpetuates” (pp. 11).
While I agree, I also want to see applications of the transformation of misogynoir from other disciplines, particularly within the social sciences. In particular, Black feminist sociology offers the concept of the “virtual sojourner” (Brown, 2021), which is grounded in similar concepts as in this book to explore the role of Black women and LGBTQ Internet users in shifting society through cultural production and activism. The similarity between the virtual sojourner and digital alchemy as constructs demonstrates that the transformation of misogynoir also has relevance for the social sciences, particularly sociology, anthropology, and psychology.
