series and what messages are conveyed about health and well-being therein. Skye’s the Limit best exemplifies the genre’s concern with healthy relationships in queer community as it follows lead character Skye through her questionable professional and personal choices. Through close readings of scenes in the series’ episodes, I argue that Skye’s the Limit, Between Women, and 195 Lewis address storylines concerning Black women’s health that are not visible in mainstream media. Mental, physical, and sexual health along with pleasure are central explorations in these web shows, missing from mainstream television. Though these web series often have short runs due to the unpredictable nature of crowdsourced resources, I argue that ephemerality is actually a compelling quality of this digital media production that is not necessarily in contention with quality. By creating short cycles and seasons, casts and crews create a snapshot of the concerns of a moment in time as well as launch the creators into other platforms that allow for greater amplification of the messages from the small screen.
Chapter 4, “Alchemists in Action against Misogynoir,” provides examples of where this transformative digital alchemy could be taking us. I interview two Black nonbinary femme Tumblr users about how they leveraged the platform to create and sustain a practice of care for themselves. I explore their engagement with the platform, their experiences of misogynoir on- and offline and how conversations through the platform helped them create a community for themselves that enabled them to transform misogynoir. In the book’s conclusion, I end by suggesting what my line of inquiry opens for future research, including the potential impact of increased surveillance of digital media and feminist cultural productions and processes in digital spaces.
You will undoubtedly notice the lack of images in this text on Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks’ creative digital resistance to the negative imagery that unfortunately shapes how they are treated in society. Given the graphic nature of some of these images, I have opted against including them in the text because I believe that we are already inundated with enough images of Black women’s subjugation. If you want to see misogynoir in action you need only turn on the news, see a movie, watch television, or scroll your timeline. You will find examples of Black women being denied their humanity in ways that have a direct impact on their lives. But you will also, as I highlight in this text, find evidence of their resistance. And while this resistance offers up some beautiful imagery, I would do it a disservice to have it rendered here in black-and-white stills of dynamic—but often of limited production value—videos or screenshots of tweets with now broken links or missing images.82 Instead, I opt for detailed description and encourage readers to find these gems in their natural habitat, in the digital sphere for which they were made.
While I initially endeavored to do a deep dive into the demographic data of the people who used these social media platforms to transform misogynoir, the information was difficult to access. Even the way I was able to access some of the tweets and videos I analyze in this text shifted over the course of writing the book, including the loss of accessible statistics regarding engagement with the digital media on different platforms. There are pieces of this project that I cannot replicate because of the changes in accessible data and the ever-increasing proprietary nature of these platforms’ terms of service. As we note in my co-authored book #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, some aspects of this research would not be possible to undertake if we began writing any later than we did.83 Similarly, Misogynoir Transformed has gone through its own transformation based on the changing nature of the data available.
You will also notice hyperlinks embedded in many of the tweets discussed. I decided not to provide active links to this content for both the users’ privacy and the likely probability that these links would no longer work by the time of publication. As digital humanist Simone Browne notes, researchers must be suspicious of surveillance given its deeply anti-Black origins and development.84 The line between accurately citing the social media content I procured and exposing the users who created that content to uninvited scrutiny is one I travel with care. The URLs encountered here are evocative of the time at which these tweets were collected, before preview text and images that now accompany links in tweets were available to noncommercial users.
These Black women as well as Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks are carving out their own spaces rather than trying to make room for themselves within existing frameworks. To be sure, using social media to react to oppressive situations is not a long-term strategy for addressing the rampant misogynoir in our society, but the way Black women have enacted digital alchemy certainly creates opportunities for transformation.
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