and real-world networks.
Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks have mobilized via Twitter hashtags to challenge their representation in American visual culture, carving out precious space for incubating restorative practices and projects digitally. While these efforts do not presume to disrupt the dominant ideology in mainstream culture that shrouds Black women, they do provide maroon landing sites of respite. Creatively manipulating and transforming social media platforms become means of harm reduction. Whether it is web series, websites, or witty hashtags, Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks are making room for themselves on digital platforms in ways that exceed what was ever intended by the engineers and corporations who designed and created these sites.
I build toward an understanding of digital alchemy as a praxis designed to create better representations for those most marginalized, through the implementation of networks of care beyond the boundaries of the digital from which it springs. Alchemy is the “science” of turning regular metals into gold. When I talk about digital alchemy I am thinking of the ways that women of color, Black women, and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks in particular transform everyday digital media into valuable social justice media that recode the failed scripts that negatively impact their lives. Digital alchemy shifts our attention from the negative stereotypes in digital culture to the redefinition of representations Black women are creating that provide another way of viewing their worlds. I argue that this process of creating transformational images challenges the normative standards of bodily representation and health presented in popular and medical culture.
These Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks are carving out their own spaces rather than trying to make room for themselves within existing frameworks. These projects are born from their experiences as marginalized subjects but do more than suggest homonormative alternatives of class ascension to access needed resources. Instead of an attempt to appeal to people in power through persuasive media, much of what is created online is explicitly for their own communities, affirming their own values and beliefs outside a hierarchical mainstream. Representation still matters, but not solely or primarily as a means to educate those with privilege. This practice is digital alchemy in action.
Digital alchemy exists at multiple levels, with some enactments following a reactionary posture that seeks to address a presented problem, while other forms are more creative, emerging from a point of production for Black women. Defensive digital alchemy takes the form of responding and recalibrating against misogynoir, while generative digital alchemy moves independently, innovated because it speaks to a desire or want for new types of representation. Defensive digital alchemy can take a reactionary posture, with Black women and Black agender, nonbinary, and gender-variant people using the digital tools available to them to redress misogynoir. It typically takes the form of a one-to-one response—for example, #RuinABlackGirlsMonday is met with #RuinAnInsecureBlackMansTuesday, discussed in chapter 1. This tit for tat does not engender the kinds of transformation of misogynoir that leads to long-lasting change, but it does let the offensive content be called out as such. Conversely, generative digital alchemy is not concerned with responding directly to the misogynoir that might inspire its production. Generative digital alchemy is born of an interest in creating new media that appeals to the community from which they come. The hashtags, web shows, and Tumblrs I describe in chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively, are all examples of generative digital alchemy in action.
Misogynoir without Borders
While the Internet has been celebrated for its ability to traverse national borders and make countries seem more porous through information exchange, social media platforms maintain demographic segregation that belies this perceived fluidity. I still find a US-centrism in the Black women’s digital media I examined for this project. While some of the tweets, videos, and Tumblrs come from English speakers outside the United States, the vast majority of the content available is created by Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks in the United States.
Additionally, the history of misogynoir I trace is contextualized through US chattel slavery and its afterlife.74 The examples of misogynoir I detail build on US history and inform the way misogynoir is manifest contemporarily in the digital spaces I examine. However, misogynoir’s virulence does not heed geopolitical borders. I am awed and saddened by the term’s uptake beyond the United States—awed that Black women and their supporters have found the word useful in a number of contexts and saddened that people find it necessary to use so frequently in all corners of the globe. I believe that those outside the United States are best positioned to speak about misogynoir—and hopefully its transformation—in their locations. I offer an invitation to readers to see this book as the first of many that address misogynoir in several arenas and locales, where I and other writers take on the unfortunate dynamism of this noxious reality. Trudy’s blog entries on misogynoir helped the term move through Internet spaces. Academics and activists in Europe, South America, Africa, and even Australia have found utility in the term.75 As recently as 2019, protests in Paris, France, and Johannesburg, South Africa, have included signs and chants decrying misogynoir.76 These uses of misogynoir and the resultant mobilizations to curb its effect on Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks deserve the proper framing that only folks directly engaged in these organizing efforts can provide. I see my work in conversation with as opposed to supplanting or superseding other work on the term, and I look forward to more work that challenges the roots of misogynoir in other locations.
Even my work on misogynoir is complicated by the fact that within a US context, Blackness is not a monolith. The tensions between Black Americans descended from enslaved Africans, Caribbeans descended from enslaved Africans, and more recent African immigrants disrupt any fantasies of an easily achievable pan-African united front against misogynoir. These intraracial fault lines are frequently part of the discussion of how misogynoir manifests, and I look forward to work by other scholars and activists who can address these tensions.
Transformation
Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed from one form to another.
—Law of conservation of energy
I titled this book Misogynoir Transformed because I could not let misogynoir go unmodified. A book titled Misogynoir on its own does not represent an action or protest. I did not want to simply explain or rehearse examples of misogynoir in a book-length project. I, like trans advocate Janet Mock, wanted an action to animate misogynoir, to signal my interest in its destruction. I did not want to account for all the vile and deleterious hate that is misogynoir without making clear that there are those of us working to transform it. Chapter 1 does take on this necessary project but also highlights examples that extend the possibility of misogynoir’s transformation. The idea of misogynoir being transformed, using that swirling mass of negative energy against itself to make something altogether different, inspires me.
“Embodied transformation,” a concept from the practice of somatics as rearticulated by organizer and facilitator adrienne maree brown in her book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, “‘is foundational change that shows in our actions, ways of being, relating, and perceiving. It is transformation that sustains over time.’”77 Transformation is achieved only when change is evident in the way we move through the world and how we continue to incorporate that change throughout time. When I talk of the transformation of misogynoir, I am interested in all of the ways that Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks work to transform the toxicity of these representations and images that cause them harm. While I hope for an eradication of misogynoir, I realize that a world without misogynoir requires more than the labor of Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks to be achieved. We can transform our relationship to misogynoir and transform the images and material consequences of misogynoir even as we are not the ones who create it. The
