Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks are often invisible in data-collection processes, making their realities marginal within the already liminal space of Black women’s digital alchemy. Nearly all of the data collected for this book assume that the category “Black women” is capacious enough to address misogynoir, but as I will detail in chapter 4, Black nonbinary and gender-variant people are also on the frontlines of the Black feminist transformation of misogynoir. As you have read in this introduction, Black women have been the central targets of misogynoir since the settling and colonization of the Americas. That Black women would then be at the heart of digital alchemists organizing in this country and beyond follows logically. But as we continue to grow our understanding of gender beyond a binary, and our digital age helps new language travel, more and more Black people are articulating themselves beyond the bounds of “woman.”
Over the course of writing this book, my collaborators—the folks about whom and with whom I write—have transformed themselves. Some have come to identify as Black feminists, having not understood themselves that way when this project began. Others reject feminism altogether in favor of womanism, or even create their own epistemic frames.70 For some, womanhood is a central part of their identity, and for others, woman is a limit that their gender transgresses. And yet, it is the work of self-identified Black women that created the space, intentionally or not, for those of us beyond the binary to find our little bit of purchase on the planet. Black women anchor this book even as Black women can experience some relative privilege in relation to their Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant peers.
This project does not attempt to address this significant gap in the literature regarding Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks who still find their fate tied to the way society thinks about Black women. I am hopeful that as we acknowledge the need for our scholarship to become even more specific to ensure that all members of our community are not overlooked, more statistical data can become disaggregated to make those on the margins of the margins visible. Research by S. A. Smythe, Treva Carrie Ellison, and Kai Green, among others, is doing the careful work of reminding people to mind the gap.71 Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks negotiate misogynoir in a myriad of ways, but as I explore in this book, they are able to achieve liberatory praxis through digital alchemy that can actually transform misogynoir into something useful.
Digital Alchemy
Digital popular culture includes all the images we see online, the conversations that happen on social media, and their circulation throughout society. As I have illustrated, negative representations of Black women existed for centuries before the digital age, but these representations have been able to circulate more quickly with the advent of the Internet. Communications scholar Safiya Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression traces the disturbing phenomena of early Google search engine results that equated any search for Black women and girls with a search for porn.72 The first images that resulted from these searches are of websites that show Black women engaged in sexual activity. Conversely, a search for “women” or even “white women” did not engender pornographic results on the first or even second page of the search. Noble’s findings challenge the widely held belief that the Internet is a democratizing force of good for all. The algorithms reflect the biases of our society and are not inoculated from them as initially postulated.
I argue that Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks’ digital resistance through content creation that challenges these problematic representations is a form of self-production that disrupts the mainstream narrative that promulgates narrow and stereotypical visions of identity. Both the process of creation and the material created are co-constitutive harm-reduction strategies in that they don’t eradicate the injury of misogynoir but they do help alleviate some of its painful impact. Harm reduction recognizes that some harm is inevitable given the current reality of society, but we can greatly reduce the impact of harm by taking appropriate actions. Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks are actively reimagining the world through digital content creation that challenges the misogynoir that negatively impacts their health, and minimizing the harm they experience in the process.
Twitter is a digital publishing medium with a low bar for entry. If you have access to a smartphone or a computer, you can make use of the platform to share your thoughts in 280 characters or less.73 Hashtags—a metadata tool for linking similar content on social media—have been instrumental in raising awareness about important real-time events and have been successful in garnering near-immediate responses from entities that are normally slow to address constituents. As I will discuss in the chapters that follow, Black women, particularly Black queer and trans women, as well as Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks have used social media to create innovative stories that speak to their interests, to challenge oppressive actions in their communities, and to transform misogynoir by building powerful digital 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