are not afforded the same types of help or public compassion that white mothers are. As in the case of the “father of gynecology” or the 1940s sterilization abuses in North Carolina and Mississippi among other places, the supposed good intentions of these efforts are overshadowed by the misogynoirist foundations on which these projects were built.
What’s Health Got to Do with It?
The emergence of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in the United States in February 2020 reanimated conversations about disparities in healthcare. While not more likely to contract the virus, Black people were three times as likely to die of it.36 Despite this reality, even trained medical professionals relied on dated stereotypes to make sense of the differences in outcomes. Ohio state senator Stephen Huffman, a medical doctor, said of the disproportionate number of Black people dying of complications from the virus, “Could it just be that African-Americans or the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups or wear a mask or do not socially distance themselves?”37 Huffman’s comments use both the antiquated racist language of “colored” and the completely unfounded stereotype of Black people as dirty. His logic depends on some of the longest-circulating racist imagery about Black people—that we are unclean, lazy, and not smart enough to follow public health guidelines amid a global pandemic. Ideas like his, held by healthcare providers, mean less effective care for Black people as they are being blamed for their health status as opposed to being treated as patients deserving of care.
The way that racism exacerbates care disparities and health outcomes has been discussed in a number of venues and has been championed by other healthcare professionals and practitioners as one of the “social determinates of health.”38 The popular PBS documentary series Unnatural Causes illustrates the way that racial disparities in health outcomes are connected to systemic discrimination.39 Research by Black women health practitioners like Nadine Burke Harris and Lisa Cooper has shown the outsized impact of racist trauma on the bodies of Black people and the doctor-patient interaction, respectively.40 Misogynoir contributes to Black women’s experiences with healthcare 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
