I had the pleasure of speaking with Monica A. Coleman and Tananarive Due on the 6th episode of their Octavia Tried To Tell Us podcast Saturday. I was a guest to the show alongside one of my favorite Black feminist thinkers, Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin.
We talked Parables, music, and masculinity. Take a listen and support the show!
I am so excited to finally announce that I will be spending the year at MIT as an Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar in the program of Women’s and Gender Studies.
Check out my intro to the community with my answers to three timely questions.
1. What are you looking forward to at MIT? I’m excited to be connected to feminists who are actively exploring the sciences. My course, “Black Feminist Health Science Studies,” [WGS.S10, offered Spring 2021] is really designed to make some critical connections between feminism, science, technology, and society. I really can’t think of a better group of students with which to explore these topics.
2. Your new book #HashtagActivism came out at a poignant time with Covid-19 keeping us home more. What are the crucial hashtags you are looking out for in the “new civil rights movement?” Unfortunately, I think we will continue to see hashtags that point to the public health crisis that is racism in the form of the names of extrajudicially killed Black people. I am excited about the hashtags that help expand our advocacy to behavior changes like #StayTheFuckHome and #MasksSaveLives.
3. Favorite song? If the class had a theme song it would be “Brujas” by Princess Nokia.
Interview with MIT WGS
NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A U.S. academic who coined the term “misogynoir” for discrimination against black women said hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter are helping activists to use social media to mobilise and demand justice.
Moya Bailey, co-author of a new book #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, coined “misogynoir” in 2008 after noticing that black women were often depicted as sex workers or unintelligent in the media or jokes.
Ellen Wulfhorst for Reuters
Join authors Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles to look at how marginalized groups use Twitter to advance counter-narratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent. Learn more about the book: https://bit.ly/35DTLt4
Two in-person events were transformed into Zoom panels and they were wonderful! We also got to do one talk, our first book talk for #HashtagActivism.
The first was with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. I talked about Caster Semenya and the undue burden placed on Black women athletes when it comes to gender, sex, and sexuality.
Human beings have long called on science to define concepts of sex and gender and used them to characterize, classify, and divide. On Friday, March 13, the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a Women’s History Month event on Science, Sex, and Gender. Moderated by Harper Jean Tobin (National Center for Transgender Equality), a panel of experts explored the role of science in evolving and expanding notions of sex and gender in a discussion that centered the lived experiences of transgender and intersex women.
Panelists:
– Harper Jean Tobin, National Center for Transgender Equality (Moderator)
– Moya Bailey, Northeastern University
– Katie Dalke, Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute
– Tori Cooper, Human Rights Campaign
– Katrina Karkazis, Brooklyn College/Yale University
Science Sex and Gender: Women's History Month 2020 from The National Academies on Vimeo.
The second panel was part of the launch of the Center on Digital Culture and Society. I talked about the need for creating a digital culture that honors pace and the humans hidden in the digital supply chain.
Center on Digital Culture and Society Digital Launch Symposium
FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2020
TECHNOLOGY, RACE, + GENDER
Moderator: Sarah J. Jackson, University of Pennsylvania
Moya Bailey, Northeastern University
Kishonna Gray, University of Illinois at Chicago
Carrie A. Rentschler, McGill University
CDCS Digital Launch Symposium: Technology, Race, and Gender Panel from CDCS on Vimeo.
So geeked for this piece to have found a home at Feminist Media Studies! Special thanks to Erica Edwards for the invitation to Rutgers that really set this piece in motion!
An excerpt below…
I really can’t express my delight in my first (co-authored) book, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, being out in the world! My amazing co-authors Sarah J. Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles and I had a wonderful crowd at The Strand Bookstore in New York City, the first stop on our book tour. Folks asked us great questions and my cousin Jonathan came!
We have been very lucky to have excerpts appear in our favorite feminist publications including Ms. Magazine and Bitch Media. We also made it on the Ms. March 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us as well as Autostraddle’s Also Also Also. Our chapter on allyship and the hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite was featured on Engadget. I got to speak with Gracie Staples at the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the book who interviewed me 16+ years earlier about my involvement in the Nelly Protest. I wonder what our actions could have sparked if we had had hashtags to support our organizing?!
The book is just $20 so do take a look to learn more about how folks are using hashtag activism to change the world! Also, come see us in a city near you!
Misogynoir is popping up in the media and I am going to do a better keeping track. Here are two places I and the word have shown up.
Why do we talk about black women differently? Activist Moya Bailey (@moyazb) coined the term “misogynoir” to address the discrimination black women face every day. pic.twitter.com/m6oU472Q2N
— Brut America (@brutamerica) March 2, 2020
The “Notorious BGS” strikes again. While the rest of us were wringing our hands about the latest far right homophobic attack, Beverly Guy-Sheftall has been quietly working to build institutions that will support us beyond reaction. I pride myself on staying up to date on the happenings of my alma mater but when my Spelman sister Ruha Benjamin forwarded me THE announcement I was shocked! Not only was I shocked by the incredible news, I was shocked to find that I was sitting in the same room with two of the people who made it possible at the moment it was announced, Evelynn Hammonds and of course Beverly Guy-Sheftall.
The significance of this gift cannot be understated. By establishing an endowed chair, the person hired for this position is freed from the institutional bureaucracy that is often used to silence progressive and radical thought. The person in this position will be free to develop curriculum, programs, and events that support Spelman College and other HBCUs in the vitally important work of gender and sexuality justice.
HBCUs have long been leaders in fomenting racial justice minded graduates but this position has the ability to build on the incredible work that the Women’s Research and Resource Center (WRRC) is already doing to equip these same graduates with a liberatory framework around gender and sexuality. It was less than 15 years ago that the first queer theory course was taught at Spelman or at any HBCU, by alumna Layli Mapayan, and just last year that the WRRC announced the development of a Gender and Sexuality Institute. BGS has been busy.
When folks ask, what’s next after marriage equality, I hope they will look to Jon Stryker’s gift as a possibility model. This is what solidarity looks like and this is what it looks like to use your privilege in the service of others. It’s clear that ally is measured not in word but deed. I couldn’t be prouder of my Spelman sisters Beverly and Evelynn’s radical commitments to Spelman College.