Moya Bailey

Northwestern University | NU · Department of Communication Studies

Danielle “StrugglingToBeHeard” Cole is a Black nonbinary femme who was launched from the relative safety of their Tumblr famous social justice online community into infamy via a viral video reposted to the notoriously unjust, WorldStarHipHop gossip blog. In this excerpt from my book, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Pre...

Disability studies has continually asked us to rethink the demands on our bodies and time by reminding us that not all humans are able to move and produce in line with these ever-mounting societal expectations. Drawing on the work of disability theorists like Susan Wendell, this article addresses the unique challenges of creating an ethical pace of...

As Elodie and 35,000 other Congolese children negotiate dangerous working conditions that impair their health, some Western consumers enjoy the fruits of their debilitating labor to fight for their own rights in the ableist infrastructure of the West. Americans and people around the world benefit from the cooling power of an aquifer in South Caroli...

“Black Museum,” the final installment of season four of the original series Black Mirror, incorporates many of the episodes that have come before it, creating an apotheosis episode that critiques the technophilia of the series. A Black woman administers justice and brings forth a rare, onscreen vision of a white man being held accountable for his r...

This “well-researched, nuanced” study of the rise of social media activism explores how marginalized groups use Twitter to advance counter-narratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent. (Ms.) The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disp...

FOLLOWING A FASCINATING talk by Ed Finn on the changing role and source of literary criticism in a digital age, Natalia Cecire queried the implicit neutrality of a term like “nerd.” Melissa Harris-Perry's reclamation aside, the racialized and gendered aspects of nerddom, and by extension digital humanities, offer opportunities for a more explicit e...

From the earliest feminist press to Twitter, women have used technology to create and sustain narratives that demand attention and redress for gendered violence. Herein we argue that the #MeToo boom was made possible by the digital labor, consciousness-raising, and alternative storytelling created through the #YesAllWomen, #SurvivorPrivilege, #WhyI...

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 addr...

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, ou...

Black Feminist Health Science Studies (BFHSS) is a critical intervention into 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 towards a theory of...

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 tra...

This article revisits the authors’ experiences as Black queer women teaching undergraduates and receiving graduate education, ultimately reflecting on these from their current professorial positions. It explores how graduate teachers and junior faculty who are Black queer women navigate the process of creating and maintaining feminist pedagogy in t...

Misogynoir describes the co-constitutive, anti-Black, and misogynistic racism directed at Black women, particularly in visual and digital culture (Bailey, 2010). The term is a combination of misogyny, the hatred of women, and noir, which means black but also carries film and media connotations. It is the particular amalgamation of anti-Black racism...

This article explores Black trans and queer women’s use of digital media platforms to create alternate representations of themselves through a process that addresses health and healing beyond the purview of the biomedical industrial complex. These activities include trans women of color using Twitter to build networks of support and masculine of ce...

There have been long-standing discussions of “participation” in political theory and media studies, and this article organises a discussion on the “participatory turn” in contemporary culture. Questions that are raised, are: To what degree has the rise of networked computing encouraged us to reimagine the public sphere? If we can move this discussi...

This article is interested in teasing out the process by which certain elements of hip hop are selected and others rejected. Here, new terms are surfaced to help broaden the current toolbox in order to resist gender oppression.

Audre Lorde tells us that naming is important. When she introduced herself as a “Black lesbian feminist mother warrior poet,” she was deliberately situating herself and her perspective in a context of co-constitutive identities. Nikki Finney says, “Repetition is holy.” Lorde’s continual refrain of her many identities became an incantation of protec...

This interview was conducted by telephone on March 21, 2006, between Atlanta, Georgia and Laurel, Maryland. CARPENTER: I wanted to talk to you about the "Take Back the Music" event that started at Spelman and all the controversy surrounding Nelly. Let's start at the beginning. Nelly was supposed to come to Spelman and do a bone drive—could you lay...