Читать книгу Misogynoir Transformed - Moya Bailey - Страница 17

While the Internet has been celebrated for its ability to traverse national borders and make countries seem more porous through information exchange, social media platforms maintain demographic segregation that belies this perceived fluidity. I still find a US-centrism in the Black women’s digital media I examined for this project. While some of the tweets, videos, and Tumblrs come from English speakers outside the United States, the vast majority of the content available is created by Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks in the United States.

Additionally, the history of misogynoir I trace is contextualized through US chattel slavery and its afterlife.74 The examples of misogynoir I detail build on US history and inform the way misogynoir is manifest contemporarily in the digital spaces I examine. However, misogynoir’s virulence does not heed geopolitical borders. I am awed and saddened by the term’s uptake beyond the United States—awed that Black women and their supporters have found the word useful in a number of contexts and saddened that people find it necessary to use so frequently in all corners of the globe. I believe that those outside the United States are best positioned to speak about misogynoir—and hopefully its transformation—in their locations. I offer an invitation to readers to see this book as the first of many that address misogynoir in several arenas and locales, where I and other writers take on the unfortunate dynamism of this noxious reality. Trudy’s blog entries on misogynoir helped the term move through Internet spaces. Academics and activists in Europe, South America, Africa, and even Australia have found utility in the term.75 As recently as 2019, protests in Paris, France, and Johannesburg, South Africa, have included signs and chants decrying misogynoir.76 These uses of misogynoir and the resultant mobilizations to curb its effect on Black women and Black nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant folks deserve the proper framing that only folks directly engaged in these organizing efforts can provide. I see my work in conversation with as opposed to supplanting or superseding other work on the term, and I look forward to more work that challenges the roots of misogynoir in other locations.

Even my work on misogynoir is complicated by the fact that within a US context, Blackness is not a monolith. The tensions between Black Americans descended from enslaved Africans, Caribbeans descended from enslaved Africans, and more recent African immigrants disrupt any fantasies of an easily achievable pan-African united front against misogynoir. These intraracial fault lines are frequently part of the discussion of how misogynoir manifests, and I look forward to work by other scholars and activists who can address these tensions.