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Misogynoir: Anti-Blackness, Patriarchy, and Refusing the Wrongness of Black Women

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The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Race and Gender

Abstract

This article engages debates on the Black feminist concept of misogynoir and its utility for confronting gender politics within Black communities, Black politics, and Black radical thought. Exploring its origins in the work of Moya Bailey and Trudy, we argue for the concept’s place within decolonial Black feminist theories traced through the work of Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Cristina Sharpe that confront the entanglements of race, gender, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy in the making of modern systems of power, knowledge, and identity. We argue that misogynoir facilitates the Black feminist work of interrogating the repeated silencing and paradoxical positioning of Black women as both a necessary absent-presence, yet epistemologically and ontologically wrong in different discourses of race, gender and the human—as well as in Black radical politics and Black Studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    BlackLivesMatter was founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in response to the acquittal of the murderer of Travon Martin. See https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/ [Accessed 12 August 2020].

  2. 2.

    MeToo, founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke as a ‘multi-racial, survivor-led collective poised to amplify the ways in which the movements to end sexual violence and racial violence are reliant upon one another.’ https://metoomvmt.org/ [Accessed 26 August 2020].

  3. 3.

    The SayHerName movement was launched in December 2014 by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) to raise awareness of ‘the often invisible names and stories of Black women and girls who have been victimized by racist police violence’.https://aapf.org/sayhername [Accessed 12 August 2020]. It is also “‘a response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the mainstream media's tendency to sideline the experiences of Black women in the context of police brutality and anti-Black violence’ Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SayHerName#cite_note-:32-6 [Accessed 26 August 2020].

  4. 4.

    Trudy provides a similar etymology of misogynoir in a 2014, Gradient Lair post, ‘Explanation of Misogynoir,’ which provides an extremely useful overview that explores many key aspects of the misogynoir debate.

  5. 5.

    In Girl Down, Manne offers an extensive discussions of several high profile examples of this in the USA.

  6. 6.

    In her book, Sharpe moves between writing Black in capitalized and without to differentiation between the abjection of blackness in the white imagination and the creative living Blackness of Black consciousness that she sees as paradoxically linked by and in the wake of the afterlife of slavery.

  7. 7.

    Spillers, H. (1987). ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection (Summer 1987), pp. 64–81.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Researcher, London, UK

    Denise Noble

  2. De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

    Lisa Amanda Palmer

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  1. Denise Noble
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  1. University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Shirley Anne Tate

  2. Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

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Noble, D., Palmer, L.A. (2022). Misogynoir: Anti-Blackness, Patriarchy, and Refusing the Wrongness of Black Women. In: Tate, S.A., Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Race and Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83947-5_12

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