details, misogynoir also shaped US domestic policy, the buying and selling of goods, and even the development of healthcare procedures. The impact of misogynoir on the lives of Black women cannot be overstated.
Misogynoir through Media
There remains a belief that recognizing the misogynoir experienced by Black women detracts from efforts to support Black men and boys. In the wake of seasons of unarmed Black men being gunned down by police, instances of Black women’s murders at the hands of the police have not evoked the same demands for police accountability.48 The Boston activist and 2020 poet laureate Porsha Olayiwola’s poem “Rekia Boyd” asks the question why no one showed up for a rally in Boyd’s honor following her slaying by off-duty police officer Dante Servin over an alleged noise complaint:
Last night
No one showed up to march for Rekia Boyd.
Rekia was shot dead in the head by cops on Monday.
A cook county judge acquitted Dante Servin, went jailbird free
Rekia Boyd was a 22-year-old unarmed Black woman who had been living on the south side of Chicago and last night no one showed up to march at her rally.
I guess all the protestors got tied up.
I guess all the Black folks were busy making signs saying, “Stop killing our Black boys!”
I guess no one hears the howling of a Black girl ghost in the night time.
We stay unheard.
Blotted out.
Buried.
Dead Black girls receive tombstones too soon and never any flowers to dress the grave so we fight alone.49
Olayiwola describes the disproportionate attention Black men and boys get when they are violated and the absence of similar demands for justice when a Black woman is killed. I argue that the silence and erasure of the violence Black women and girls endure are connected to society’s inability to see them as worthwhile subjects deserving of respect and care, a sentiment exacerbated by misogynoir. Olayiwola’s words echo the epigraph that animates this text, reminding us that since we as Black women “fight alone,” “we must save ourselves.”50 Part of this saving includes the creation of representations that challenge the ways we are viewed.
Representations of Black women in popular culture help support and perhaps even bolster the harm they experience. In 2003, when fifteen-year-old Sakia Gunn and friends refused the street harassment of twenty-nine-year-old Richard McCullough and his friend by saying they were lesbians, McCullough got out of the car to retaliate. McCullough stabbed Gunn and fled, and though she was rushed to the hospital, she died of her injuries. McCullough’s sense of entitlement to Gunn’s attention pushed him out of the car and into choking her friend and ultimately killing Gunn. His beliefs about her sexuality and his right to control and punish her for what he perceived as its misapplication have everything to do with the misogynoir that makes Black women and girls seem undeserving of their autonomy and lives. When Black women are only rendered visually as in service to men, their autonomy is not believed. Misogynoir can precipitate racist gendered violence that harms “social well-being” and impacts mental and physical health, and can even result in death, the direst of health outcomes.
Portrayals of Black women as straight and at the disposal of men who desire them shape our cultural landscape. When misogynoir paints all Black women as sexually available to men, Gunn’s defiance is not only challenged but punished. Her health, her very life, is at stake when stereotypes materialize into justifications for deadly behaviors. In 2006, when another group of Black lesbian teens tried to defend themselves against a catcaller turned attacker, they were vilified in the news as a “wolf pack, an inhuman gang of animals.”51 Media’s portrayal of the “New Jersey Four,” as their group became known, led to them receiving longer and harsher prison sentences, despite the fact that the young women were trying to defend themselves against a man who tried to assault the smallest in their group.52 This violence and these harsher sentences, as numerous studies have shown, are disproportionately visited upon Black women.53
While many studies have explored the physical health of Black women, few have considered premature death, mental health, physical well-being, housing, education, and access to pleasure as equally important health concerns that misogynoir negatively impacts. Beyond public health calls to address maternal mortality and the so-called “obesity epidemic” among Black women, there is a need to address Black women’s health at a fundamental level that includes their quality of life beyond ableist metrics. Black women deserve to have accurate representations of themselves in popular culture. The images that circulate about them should support their well-being in society instead of negatively impacting their ability to live their lives. And, as in the quote that orients this entire text, Black women are doing that work themselves.54
Mitigating Misogynoir through Media Making
Black feminists’ activist and scholarly interest in representation was born of these real concerns for the ways that misogynoir shapes Black women’s daily treatment in the world. Like feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality,” “misogynoir” names a concept that Black feminists have discussed since our earliest preserved writings, speeches, and poetry.55 In 1851, abolitionist Sojourner Truth revealed the ways womanhood is raced such that Black women are excluded from the category and therefore subject to abuses that white women are not.56 Black studies scholar Hortense Spillers’s classic text “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” explores the degendering of Black women in US slavery and their subsequent treatment as commodities of labor and breeding for white slaveholders.57 Black women were not women, but their fertility was essential for the maintenance of slavery. Both Truth and Spillers describe the way that Black women are subjected to differential treatment in society based on their simultaneous marginalization along the lines of race and gender.
While initial challenges to misogynoirist representations of Black women in the early twentieth century involved some classist and moralizing sentiments about proving oneself in the public sphere, the digital age has made way for strategies that reject respectability in favor of more multifaceted representations of Black women in all of our complexities. Respectability is the idea that if marginalized groups comport themselves well, they may be able to be accepted into society. Whether through the activism of Black club women during the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, or the Black women’s media renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s, Black women were creating the visions of themselves that they wished to see.58 Black feminist thought has expanded to be more inclusive of Black women who are not interested in respectability because not only does it not produce different affective treatment of Black women in society, it delimits comportment and leads to intra-group policing that is more harmful than helpful. In every era, Black women have been at the forefront of creating media for themselves that challenge misogynoir, whether explicitly or implicitly.
These new digital dissensions follow a long history in the twentieth century of Black women transforming the way they were portrayed in popular culture. TV shows like Living Single (1993) and films like Daughters of the Dust (1991) gave Black women artists more opportunities to tell more stories about who they were from their own perspective. Current media projects attempt to bring forward alternative representations of Black women, but these efforts can be marginalized by the conglomeration of media companies, which makes it difficult for these dissident voices and images to find space. The digital skills built through social media use are being leveraged for more sustainable and generative media now and in the future.
Black
