about
how my real enemy
is the system.
i’m no genius,
but i do know
that system
you hit me with
is called
a fist.63
Like Olayiwola, Parker identifies the ways Black women are supposed to ignore their own pain in service to a perceived greater threat outside the Black community. Black women are expected to sublimate their concerns for the good of their communities. Perry’s scene also demonstrates an interdependency between gender role expressions, where proper “positive” Black masculinity can be obtained only through the subordination of Black femininity.64 Perry’s portrayals mirror Moynihan’s damning report on the Black family, as Black men are often physically fighting to put Black women back into the imagined “correct” place in the gender hierarchy, with men at the top. Black women are publicly derided by other Black people—from ambivalent Black leaders to apathetic media moguls, Black comedians to hip hop stars—with little consequence.
While Black people were perhaps initially invested in a strategy of proving their humanity through self-policing behavior and comportment (like that of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century club women), the overwhelming evidence—in the form of continued disparate treatment—shows that these efforts did not mitigate misogynoir. The practice of displaying respectable representations of themselves in media as a strategy for uplift gave way to recognition that any secondary positive feelings white audiences had for Black people as a result of self-generated representation had little material purchase in their lives. Racial uplift in a white supremacist world remains a central theme in many media projects over the years; however, queer and trans Black women create cultural works that challenge intraracial misogynoir because of their liminal space within a community that is already marginalized. By crafting reflections of the racialized and gendered violence that happens in our own spaces because of colorism, homophobia, and trans antagonism, queer and trans Black women push for accountability within their own networks as opposed to without. It seems that Black women must continue to look to themselves for representations that affirm and expand who they are as human beings. Misogynoir Transformed endeavors to bring some of these practices to the fore.
Black Women ≠ Black Feminists
In writing this book, I struggled to come up with language that fully captured who is engaged with this transformation of misogynoir. The term “Black women” is often assumed to mean straight and cis, with queer and trans Black women identified explicitly because of this normative assumption. Additionally, the term “Black women” is not inclusive of nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant Black folks whose experiences of misogynoir are intimately connected with a misgendering of them. I struggled to reconcile my use of a term that is central to my definition of misogynoir yet excludes some of the people most invested in its transformation. For those of us on the margins of Black womanhood, “woman” is not what we name ourselves even as misogynoir colors our experiences of the world. As you will see in this text, it is often those of us in the shadow of “Black women” who are the most engaged in media projects that transform misogynoir. As we in the shadows are already limited by the frame of “Black womanhood,” we become some of misogynoir’s most vociferous opponents because it further diminishes our already limited light. When a hetero- and cis-normative understanding of Black woman is used, it obscures the realities of those of us in the shade.
I experimented with terms to describe those of us on the margins of the margins of Black womanhood as I experimented with terms before landing on “misogynoir.”65 Digital spaces are rife with words, phrases, and terms that attempt, sometimes awkwardly, to address the slippage between “women” and all who aren’t cis men. One of these terms is “non-men,” which centers men as it attempts to define those who are not. “Non-men” is used online as a catchall term, but its use recreates the exact erasure it wants to undo. “Womxn” seems a useful interlocutor with its roots in precolonial indigenous languages and contemporary decolonial lingual practices. The x in “womxn” intervenes in the racist colonial histories of English and Spanish while also attempting to solve the problem of genders beyond the man/woman binary. That is a lot of work for one letter to accomplish. However, even as “womxn” by definition includes gender nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant people who don’t identify as women, reading the term in text does not make those communities readily apparent. As S. A. Smythe asks in their article on Black feminisms’ slippages with the terms “feminists” and “women,” “Who all over there in ‘womxn’?”66 When a term is created to encapsulate those outside or alongside the term “Black women,” another erasure occurs.
The phrase “women and femmes” has also been used in social media spaces to make space for those who are not women but may find themselves hailed by the term “femme,” which also has contested meanings.67 But “women and femmes” doesn’t quite capture all the targets of misogynoir. There are masculine-of-center, agender, and nonbinary people who experience the deleterious effects of misogynoir and who may not identify as women or femmes, as Sakia Gunn’s murder unfortunately illustrates. Similarly, not all nonbinary Black femmes experience misogynoir because they are not read as Black women in public. For some femmes, homophobia and femmephobia might be the lens through which they become targets of violence. Black femmephobia is an important form of oppression to discuss, but it is not a synonym for misogynoir. Misogynoir is deployed because of social beliefs about Black women, and those of us who are read as Black women—despite our self-identification—get caught in the crosshairs.
I appreciate my colleague Anima Adjepong’s formulation of “Black women adjacent” (BWA) to signal members of the nonbinary, agender, gender-variant community who may still be interpellated by misogynoir. “BWA” signals the fact that these diverse groups of folks are neighbors of Black women on the gender block but are also living in their own communes and multi-family duplexes. “BWA” also extends a potential for solidarity in that “adjacent” means “alongside” and “near.” While all neighbors are not neighborly, “adjacent” hints at possible coalitions that are worth imagining and fostering. But “BWA” as an acronym or written out does not make immediately clear who is being called forth.
“BWA” does not work for my purposes because it is opaque. The term opens possibilities of solidarity even as it makes the constituencies it serves more difficult to ascertain. Having already used my invented portmanteau “misogynoir” in the title and introducing a new framework of digital alchemy, I do not wish to overload this text with more new terms of which the reader needs to keep track.68 I will write out “Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks” in this text when necessary to prevent the continued conflation and erasure of these members from our neighborhood.69
I challenge you, dear reader, as you read this text, to think of Black women first when you see the word “woman,” to think of queer and trans women first when you read the term “Black women.” When you read the term “Black feminists,” do not assume that it is interchangeable with “Black women,” for as this text and others I reference make clear, not all Black women are feminists and not all Black feminists are women. The projects and people I highlight in this text do not fit neatly into either category. Much like the media they create, these people are not easily slotted into a box labeled “feminist” or “women.”
Many of the Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant people I discuss have a dynamic relationship to labels. There are feminist elements to their work though the work itself may not be feminist; they may have identified as a woman at some point but not at the time I examined their work. What they all do share, however, is that they create digital media that center and uplift the experiences of Black women and girls, trans and cis, as the primary targets of misogynoir. “Black women” in the title of this text affirms Black women’s centrality to the project of transforming misogynoir, even when it is not Black women or Black feminists who engage in the production of transformative media. To say the same