French film critic Nino Frank coined the term “film noir” in 1946 to describe the gritty, cynical, and initially American movies that had unusually cruel themes for the time. The motion picture genre is characterized by its dark and sometimes sexually charged undercurrents; examples include films like The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Like “film noir,” “misogynoir” originally described American media but similarly grew to transcend borders to describe an unfortunately global phenomenon. Whether in film, television, or as I examine extensively in this book, digital media, misogynoir has found a home in each of the communication advancements of the last two centuries.
Misogynoir is perpetuated through popular media like cartoons, minstrel shows, yearbooks, television, movies, and even Facebook, the digital descendant of yearbooks.2 Black feminist theory clearly articulates the power of the image to serve the hegemony of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” by controlling the way society views marginalized groups and how we view ourselves.3 Black feminist theorist bell hooks discusses the importance of producing images that counter the normalizing force of stereotypes, but also exposes the danger of reactionary positive images that can constrain and confine. We need complex images that break the good/bad, white/Black dichotomy. As hooks offers in Black Looks, we should be “asking ourselves questions about what type of images subvert, pose critical alternatives, and transform our world views and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad.”4 Similarly, Patricia Hill Collins argues against “controlling images” that attempt to delimit the potential ways of being for Black women in the world.5
The media that circulate misogynoir help maintain white supremacy by offering tacit approval of the disparate treatment that Black women negotiate in society. Whether the Jezebel, mammy, Sapphire, and later the “welfare queen” or even the “strong Black woman” archetype, misogynoiristic portrayals of Black women shape their livelihoods and health. As media studies scholars attest, negative images and narratives do more than affect the self-esteem of the populations depicted. Misogynoiristic caricatures materially impact the lives of Black women by justifying poor treatment throughout all areas of society and throughout US history.
I use methods from a diverse number of fields, including Africana studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, digital humanities, and the social sciences to trace the ways that Black women transform misogynoir. Whether it is using the digital humanities tools Gephi and Voyant for network and text analysis, respectively, or the close reading of media texts in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and Africana studies, as well as the interview from sociology, this text draws on a variety of methodological traditions to tell the story of Misogynoir Transformed. Without a mixed-method approach, I would be unable to adequately convey the dynamic ways Black women are using social media as a form of health praxis.
Perceptions of Black women as animalistic, strong, and insatiable have had material consequences on their lives and bodies since Africans’ nonconsensual arrival in the West. The 1810s display and public autopsy in Europe of the Khoi Khoi Sarah Baartman for her “abnormal” body, as described in the preface, is one of the earliest examples of misogynoir in media, as her exaggerated image was used in newspapers and advertisements to draw paying audiences to see her. Starting in the 1820s and lasting through the 1950s, minstrel representations that also exaggerated and mocked Blackness circulated widely through performances, postcards, and even radio plays. The humor attached to minstrel performances and representations attempted to assuage mounting racial and gender tensions in both the pre–Civil War and the post-slavery eras.
Antebellum constructions of the Black woman as the hypersexual Jezebel served the lecherous and capitalist intent of the white power structure, who profited off the children they forced these women to birth, often at a physical cost. The 1840s vaginal fistula operations without anesthesia that enslaved women Betsy, Anarcha, and Lucy were subjected to by J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology,” were engineered to repair Black women’s bodies damaged during childbirth.6 Once perfected on these women, who, as enslaved women, could not consent to treatment, the procedure was deemed safe for white women, who were not denied anesthesia since they were considered too delicate to endure the procedure without it. Enslaved Black women were simultaneously gendered and ungendered through the objectification of their anatomy, whether in the service of white women’s health or being rendered as genderless laborers and property.7 Black women were considered unrapeable and were understood in white society to be the lascivious and willing seductresses of white men. This imagining fueled the sexual violation of Black women during slavery as well as later Jim Crow sexual harassment and rapes.8
From the post–Civil War period to the Jim Crow era, the iconography used to support Black people’s continued subservience morphed and expanded to make room for use of Black women as poorly paid domestics who reared white children. Since whites no longer needed to read Black women as exotic temptresses and breeders of an entire labor force, the mammy archetype promulgated an image of a sweet, caring, fat (i.e., undesirable) caregiver. Scholar Kimberly Wallace-Sanders’s work on the mammy figure has exposed how caricatures and images are able to supersede reality. Wallace-Sanders describes how the images of the mammy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic abolitionist text Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the definitive representation of the character, a big, dark-skinned Black woman with a checkered handkerchief on her head, when previous depictions of mammies showed women of different sizes and complexions who wore various styles of servant dress.9 The real Black women who performed this domestic labor were obscured by a widely circulating representation of them that aided white supremacy by refiguring them as less threatening, asexual servants to the existing power structure.
The supposed good-natured warmth of the mammy figure is coupled with the indelible image of an asexual, happy yet sassy servant, an effective trope for white consumers that continues to live on contemporarily. Mammy is still used in the iconography of popular brands to this day.10 For example, Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix and Syrup was sued in 2014 for failing to pay royalties to the alleged descendants of Anna Harrington, the Black woman whose likeness appears on the box and the purported original mastermind behind the recipe.11 Only in June 2020 did Quaker Oats, the parent company of Aunt Jemima, acknowledge the damaging and enduring nature of this mammy iconography when it finally announced plans to remove the image and name from its products in the wake of criticism spurred by uprisings around the country in protest of anti-Black police brutality.12 Mammy still serves as a mollifying myth that projects home and quality for white people, all the while obscuring the white male supremacist power structure’s investment in and actual profit from this image that still hides their continued sexual abuse of Black women. Whether the Pine-Sol lady, the Popeye’s Chicken lady, or a digital media meme of Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind (1939), mammy remains an important archetype in all but name, and as such continues to weave misogynoir through Black women’s lives and their health outcomes. The impact of cleaning chemicals, environmental racism, and fast food on the health of Black women is made a problem of Black women’s poor choices rather than a predictable outcome linked to food deserts, brownfield lands, and limited access to healthcare.13 In a culture that equates thinness with good health and desirability, fat Black women are demonized for their bodies even as their bodies are used to sell goods and rear white children.14
Fat Black women’s bodies reinforce the idea that they are in service to others, whether through the reassuring support of a wide bosom on which to seek emotional comfort, their purported undesirability (which makes them available to others’ needs), or their perceived slow pace (which keeps them tied to the domestic sphere). Despite important research that exposes the racial and gender biases embedded in the Body Mass Index (BMI) used to determine relative health by calculating an ideal range of weight-to-height measurements, Black women are still considered to have the highest rates of obesity in the United States, with four out of five Black women considered obese.15 Fat Black women even feel pressure to apologize for or justify their bodies because of how misogynoir makes them hypervisible in society. Memoirs by writer Roxane Gay and actor Gabourey Sidibe include extended discussions about why they are fat, with details of the trauma or genetic imprint that makes them look as they do.16 Black women’s bodies
