An important grad school hack that I learned after grad school is that you can and should listen to authors talk about their books via book talks! I’m still angling for a Misogynoir Transformed C-SPAN appearance but in the interim, please enjoy this conversation I had with Lee Pierce of the New Books Network!
Also, while you listen, sign up for one of my forthcoming book talks! Would love to hear your questions during any Q&A.
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…
Image of Letitia Wright as Nish in the Black Mirror Episode “Black Museum.”
Brooke Foucault Welles and Sarah J. Jackson look on as I talk into the mic at our book tour launch at the Strand Bookstore in New York City. Photo by @MLMillerPhD
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!
This article took years but I think it was worth the wait!
A Black feminist disability framework allows for methodological considerations of the intersectional nature of oppression. Our work in this article is twofold: to acknowledge the need to consider disability in Black Studies and race in Disability Studies, and to forward an intersectional framework that considers race, gender, and disability to address the gaps in both Black Studies and Disability Studies. By employing a Black feminist disability framework, scholars of African American and Black Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Disability Studies have a flexible and useful methodology through which to consider the historical, social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of disability.
You can read it here! Also, if you enjoy this piece, please help my co-author Izetta, get her lettas!
This piece has been years in the making! So grateful for you @thetrudz!
We, Moya Bailey and Trudy aka @thetrudz, had significant roles in the creation and proliferation of the term misogynoir. Misogynoir describes the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience. Despite coining the term in 2008 and writing about the term online since 2010, we experience, to varying degrees, our contributions being erased, our writing not cited, or our words plagiarized by people who find the word compelling. It
is not surprising that misogynoir would be enacted against the Black women who brought the word to public acclaim but it is nonetheless troubling. This is not to say that every time the word is used, our names need to be mentioned, but it does matter that our intellectual interventions are understood in proper context. In
this article, we interview each other and discuss the ramifications of the naming of misogynoir in digital media and its impact on our own lives.
I’m proud to have an article in this special issue of the American Journal of Law & Medicine. It is a treat to be published alongside scholars I really admire like Ruha Benjamin, Khiara M. Bridges, Terence Keel, Osagie K. Obasogie, Patricia J. Williams, Lundy Braun, and more!
Here’s a taste:
Abraham Flexner In 1910, Abraham Flexner, a leading U.S. educational scholar, took on a task issued by the Carnegie Foundation to assess the curricular components of medical schools in the United States and Canada. His groundbreaking report transformed the practice of educating doctors, making institutions more standardized and uniform in their aim to educate the next generations of physicians. It is through his work that medical doctors became well-respected professionals with extensive and complex training.
Ayana Jamieson and I labored for two years to get this special issue out and we are so glad that it is finally here! Please enjoy!
Award winning author Octavia E. Butler crafted a life as unique as any of her stories. Regarded as the grand dame of Afrofuturism, Butler is also the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant for her fiction and nonfiction writing. Born in 1947, in Pasadena, CA, June 22, 2017 would be have been her 70th birthday. As one of the first recognizable Black feminist science fiction writers to date, Butler had an illustrious career despite lackluster grades in primary school. She set her intention to become a writer at an early age and worked diligently to propel herself forward. She developed a process that she called “positive obsession” and wrote every day to advance her craft. She wrote at least sixteen novels (including a few have never been published), short stories and essays, and is heralded as one of the most influential Black speculative fiction writers in the world. This special issue of the journal Palimpsest celebrates her life and legacy by introducing and bringing to the fore scholarly work that is inspired by her science fiction.
Palimpsest was the obvious choice for this special issue as the palimpsest is an implicit theme in Butler’s work. Palimpsest describes the traces of previously erased or overwritten writing that show through in the newest versions of the work. We see this practice in Butler’s writing with historical texts, concepts, and conventions bleeding through to the present and into the future through time travel, genetic ancestry, and muscle memory.
Black feminist health science studies (BFHSS) is a product of Hamer’s clarion call to attend to Black peoples’ health and wellness as an integral part of social justice labor. As such, BFHSS critically intervenes in a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including feminist health studies, contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations, disability studies, environmental justice, and feminist technoscience studies (Bailey, 2016). We argue for a theory of BFHSS that builds on social justice science, which has as its focus the health and well-being of marginalized groups. We would like to move towards a social justice science that understands the health and well-being of people to be its central purpose. This formulation of BFHSS provides evidence of the co-constitutive nature of medical science and popular perception, underscoring the need to engage them simultaneously. Health is both a desired state of being and a social construct necessary of interrogation because race, gender, ablebodiedness, and other aspects of cultural production profoundly shape our notions of what is healthy (Metzl & Kirkland, 2010).
In this research, we examine the advocacy and community building of transgender women on Twitter through methods of network and discourse analysis and the theory of networked counterpublics. By highlighting the network structure and discursive meaning making of the #GirlsLikeUs network, we argue that the digital labor of trans women, especially trans women of color, represents the vanguard of struggles over self-definition. We find that trans women on Twitter, led by Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, and in response to histories of misrepresentation and ongoing marginalization and violence, deliberately curate an intersectional networked counterpublic that works to legitimize and support trans identities and advocate for trans autonomy in larger publics and counterpublics.
is not surprising that misogynoir would be enacted against the Black women who brought the word to public acclaim but it is nonetheless troubling. This is not to say that every time the word is used, our names need to be mentioned, but it does matter that our intellectual interventions are understood in proper context. In
