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 Hollywood is producing images to counter the globe-circling archetypes that negatively portray our communities. Independent films like Pariah (2011) and the even earlier Eve’s Bayou (1997) have received critical acclaim but have had limited circulation in mainstream venues. More popular and available Black films attempt to challenge some stereotypes while reinforcing others. In the process of creating these alternative/“positive” representations, cis male producers and writers may challenge depictions of Black men as weak, unemployed, or unintelligent while stereotypes about Black women are reified and reinscribed. Additionally, positive Black masculinity in these films is equated with the Black male character’s ability to achieve the heteronormative, patriarchal, capitalistic American Dream. It is the acquisition of the assimilationist fantasy that provides the Hollywood ending. This goal is reached through the often-violent reassertion of hierarchal gender roles. Films popularized and written by Tyler Perry are consummate examples of this practice. Perry is in a category all his own, given his ability to finance his own productions and his popularity in Black markets, particularly among Black women. Yet his female protagonists are punished for their career ambition and assertive personalities through the contraction of HIV or humiliating chastising by a male paramour.59 In his narratives, Black women are physically dragged back into their place or pushed out of the way by Black men.60
For example, in Perry’s Why Did I Get Married? (2007), the character Marcus strangles his wife, Angela, when she reveals that his STI is courtesy of the man she was sleeping with, who passed it to her. Marcus’s masculinity is presumably undermined by Angela’s wine-induced, Sapphire-inspired vitriol, in which she accuses him of cheating, which he (also) was. Her duplicitous intent for withholding her affair with Walter is presented as more egregious than his own deceit. His rage is justified by the reactions of his friends and the audiences viewing the film, while Angela’s deception is not. As Marcus chokes her, we hear another man in the scene shout, “I hope you break her throat!” Marcus and his friend’s support of physical violence against Angela does not elicit any reprimand from the other friends still seated around the dinner table. Though eventually pulled away from Angela, Marcus never faces consequences for his treatment of her, nor is Angela portrayed as someone who has just been assaulted.61 The fact that the local sheriff is present but sees no need to do more than help pull the two apart further enforces the justifiable nature of Marcus’s actions. The violence of the scene—Angela literally being choked—is set up as comic relief, with audiences prompted to laugh uproariously when Marcus finally loses his cool.
These acts of filmic violence are not coded as such. Violence against Black women is made normal, comic, and necessary for the attainment of a positive Black masculinity, making intraracial violence against Black women off-screen tolerable and unremarkable.62 The poem “Brother”