Baartman, a young Khoisan woman from what we now recognize as South Africa, was displayed throughout Europe to paying white audiences as an example of the animalistic and inferior nature of the African woman. Implicit in Baartman’s display was a comparison between her body and that of the white women who viewed her. European scientists equated Baartman’s anatomical differences with sexual deviance, drawing conclusions about her sexuality and subsequently, the sexuality of Black women from her form. Her butt and genitalia were used to justify racist and sexualized violence as well as the continued enslavement of Africans in the “New World.”1 Dr. Guy-Sheftall explained that the exploitative way Baartman’s body was treated in life and in death was made possible under the guise of “objective science, ” though what Baartman actually endured was objectification through scientific racism and sexism. In my first week at Spelman, before I had even attended a class, Dr. Guy-Sheftall had challenged my thinking by describing the differential treatment Black women experienced on a global stage. After that moment, I knew I wanted to take every class I could with her.
I was awakened to the profundity of the unique nexus of experience that is Black and woman on this planet and throughout colonial history. Along with enrolling in Dr. Guy-Sheftall’s classes, I took classes with fellow feminist professor Dr. M. Bahati Kuumba (Dr. K), who gave me the final nudge into the open arms of the comparative women’s studies major at Spelman. As I was matriculating, I also got involved in the feminist political organizations on campus, all of which were supported by the Women’s Research and Resource Center, the home of the comparative women’s studies department. It was Dr. K who asked, “You are taking all the classes. Why not be a major?” When she put it that way, there was no room for rebuttal. But in truth, I was a willing convert, despite still having every intention of attending medical school—but that was not to be.
As a nineteen-year-old junior and then president of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance (FMLA), I showed the group Nelly’s music video for the song “Tip Drill,” which had started airing on the late-night television show Uncut on BET (Black Entertainment Television). The video featured, most memorably, a scene where Nelly slides a credit card down the crack of a Black woman’s butt. Our group decided to name him our Misogynist of the Month, not knowing that the Spelman Student Government Association had agreed to partner with Nelly and his foundation JesUs-4-Jackie to hold a bone marrow registration drive on our campus in an effort to save the life of his sister, who had leukemia.2
FMLA raised questions about the misogynoir in his video and lyrics, and when we heard that Nelly was invited to campus, it seemed only fair that we ask him about the way he represented Black women since he was asking us for our help. Nelly declined our offer to talk about his music. Instead, he went to the press, twisting the story such that it seemed that Spelman canceled the bone marrow registration drive because of the video, an assertion that many still believe today, though we orchestrated our own drive.3 The story garnered national and eventually international headlines, both praising and condemning Spelman students for daring to talk back to the music.4
It was a hard lesson in the hypervisibility and invisibility of being a Black woman.5 Nelly felt entitled to our assistance with saving his sister’s life but did not feel that he had to address us, the Black women who dealt with the fallout of his video and lyrics in our day-to-day lives. As young Black women, we felt the impact of the video and lyrics in the form of street harassment in the United States and abroad. We dealt with assumptions about our sexual availability to men in the form of unsolicited commentary on our bodies, on our clothing, and on our time. He used his celebrity, built on the bodies of Black women, to urge people to support an underappreciated cause, the health of Black women. Black women are far less likely to find a matching bone marrow donor than their white woman counterparts, in part because of Black people’s deep distrust of the systemic racism in medicine, which makes them less likely to volunteer to donate. What was not quite clear to me in 2004 was the irony of using a fame garnered through limiting representations of Black women while refusing to address that decision and also wanting support from those very same Black women.
I wasn’t quite able to connect the dots between popular media representations of Black women and my and other Black women’s experiences with discriminatory housing practices, intimate partner violence (IPV), street harassment, employment discrimination, and ill treatment from healthcare providers, but my interest in the role media plays in shaping the perceptions of Black women became all-consuming, such that the goal of becoming a medical doctor morphed into getting a doctorate to investigate the role that media representations play in the treatment of Black women patients by white doctors. I learned about the ways historical popular culture seeped into the consciousness of supposedly objective future physicians, which prompted me to consider how popular culture representations influence Black women’s treatment in society and medicine today.6
It was in writing that dissertation that I landed on the word “misogynoir” to describe the particular venom directed at Black women through negative representations in media. How do you describe the ways that Black women are uniquely denigrated because of their gender and race? I played with a couple of terms before landing on “misogynoir.” Initially, the term existed only in my dissertation until 2008, when I was invited to join the Crunk Feminist Collective (CFC), an online blogging community of feminists of color.
From 2008 to 2013, the CFC dominated the think piece blogosphere with insightful and pithy commentary on popular culture, primarily through the lens of hip hop feminism.7 At its height, the CFC blog was home to fourteen Black and feminist of color bloggers who wrote about the news of the day, paying special attention to highlight the intersection of race and gender in their writing.8 Founded by Black feminist scholars Brittney Cooper and Susana Morris, then graduate students at Emory University in Atlanta, the CFC bridged a seemingly contradictory love for crunk hip hop music that dominated the radio airwaves in the aughts and the feminist theory they were learning in grad school.9
The blog was a space for timely and incisive criticism, and my first post, “They Aren’t Talking about Me . . . ,” discussed my concern about my own apathetic response to “misogynoir” in music; it was the word’s first appearance outside my dissertation.10 Once I used the word, other members of the collective started to use the term and it appeared in more CFC posts. From there, some members of the blogosphere began to use it, but no one more compellingly than womanist blogger Trudy at her now sunsetted Gradient Lair.11 Her work introduced online communities to the word, and she deftly articulated its utility. Her work and others helped the term reach a wide range of audiences, including an international one.
When I coined the term, I did not expect it to go viral. In addition to appearing in the New York Times, Ebony, Essence, and the Washington Post, “misogynoir” has its own Wikipedia entry, which receives thousands of views every day. It is also referenced in numerous scholarly journal articles and monographs. The adoption of the term and its wide reach in digital spaces make further theorization of its use important for gender, critical race, and cultural studies audiences outside the academy. I hope that, in addition to creating a term that is useful, I have created a book that is useful to the communities with which I study. I hope that future efforts similar to the successful campaigns and actions I describe here will further improve the lives of Black women and their communities.
Introduction
What Is Misogynoir?
“Misogynoir” (pronounced mi-soj-uhn-nwar) is a term I created in 2008 to describe the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience, particularly in US visual and digital culture.1 Misogynoir is not simply the racism that Black women encounter, nor is it the misogyny Black women negotiate. Misogynoir describes the 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.
The term is a portmanteau of “misogyny,” the hatred of women, and “noir,” the French word
