2 June 2021
Misogynoir was coined in 2010 by Black feminist scholar and activist Moya Bailey as a term for misogyny that is unique to or specifically directed at Black women. The word is an English-French blend of misogyn[y] + noir (black).
In a 14 March 2010 article for the Crunk Feminist Collective Bailey wrote:
My reorientation to the misogynoir* ruling the radio took place when I tried to make the argument that “All the Way Turnt Up” was a great song because it didn’t objectify women. This was something I could get behind; a song simply extolling the youthful value of keeping the bass bumping in your vehicle. That was until I read the lyrics and found the choice lyric “three dike bitches, and they all wanna swallow.”
And her note reads:
Word I made up to describe the particular brand of hatred directed at black women in American visual & popular culture.
A somewhat more precise and expansive definition was given by Tamura Lomax in her 2018 book Jezebel Unhinged:
“Misogynoir,” a term coined by black queer feminist Moya Bailey, highlights the intersectionality and particularity of oppressive structures, forces, and ideas that are race-, sex-, gender-, and class-specific. It gives voice to an explicit brand of misogyny that overwhelmingly and intentionally attacks black women and girls.
Also, in 2018 Bailey commented on why she coined the word, giving examples of misogynoir, and noting that misogynoir not only comes from white men but rather is systemic, coming from Black men and even from feminists too:
I had concerns about the ways cis and trans Black women are represented in contemporary media. I was troubled by the way straight Black men talked about Black women online and in music. It seemed that straight Black men were always instructing Black women about what to do with their bodies. So much of what was presented as the ways Black men and women relate to each other was an assumed heterosexual cis desire, and about how Black women were failing at being desirable. For me, naming misogynoir was about noting both an historical anti-Black misogyny and a problematic intraracial gender dynamic that had wider implications in popular culture. Misogynoir can come from Black men, white men and women, and even other Black women. The Onion “jokingly” calling Quvenzhané Wallis a cunt, or the way that Raven-Symoné dismissed Black girls with “ghetto names,” or even the way white feminist writers tried to frame Nicki Minaj’s rightful call out of industry inequities, Black women and girls are being treated in a uniquely terrible way because of how societal ideas about race and gender intersect.
Since its coining, other writers have sometimes expanded the definition of misogynoir to include women of color generally. But Bailey is on the record as objecting to this more general definition, contending that it is important that “the term is used to describe the unique ways in which Black women are pathologized in popular culture.” While coiners of words do not have control over how those words are used and changed, she does have a valid point in that the experience of Black women is very often not the same as that of other women of color and that misogynoir is a more valuable term when its use is restricted to the context of Black women and girls.
Sources:
Bailey, Moya. “They Aren’t Talking About Me...” Crunk Feminist Collective, 14 March 2010.
Bailey, Moya and Trudy. “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism.” Feminist Media Studies, 18.4, 2018, 762–68. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395.
Lomax, Tamura. Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2018, 213. HathiTrust Digital Archive.