Visit theallusionist.org/misogynoir to listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, pull back the curtain to find language is just some dude who scarpers in a hot air balloon.
Very excited that today’s episode features someone who coined a word - AND the word is a portmanteau! A lot of you assume I hate portmanteaus - I don’t, I love them, which is why the bad ones hurt so much. This one is a very good portmanteau to describe something that is not good at all.
On with the show.
HZ: Did it take you long to come up with the word? It's a very neat portmanteau.
MOYA BAILEY: Oh, thank you. It took me a little time to settle on it. I tried like some other terms that just didn't feel right. So I maybe in the course of like a week or so, I was like, What about this? Hm, no... This one feels right. Yeah.
HZ: The word she coined is ‘misogynoir’.
MOYA BAILEY: Hello. My name is Moya Bailey. I am an assistant professor at Northeastern university in Africana studies and women's gender and sexuality studies. I coined the term 'misogynoir' in 2008 while I was writing my dissertation.
HZ: What brought you to inventing it? Because obviously the concept was not new.
MOYA BAILEY: Right. So the concept of misogynoir is old, but the term really tries to solidify an understanding of anti-Black racist misogyny. And I was working on a dissertation that looked at how medical students are trained to interact with different patient populations. And what was surprising to me was, I'm looking at this moment right after this influential Flexner report is released that really shakes up North American schools and gets them to consolidate and also move away from an apprenticeship model of medicine, towards a science and what they imagined to be a very objective kind of medical education.
HZ: Objective is so often imagined, isn’t it? The Flexner Report of 1910 recommended having fewer, better doctors. However the real impact was fewer doctors that weren’t white and male. As a result of the report’s consolidation ideas, 89 of 155 medical schools closed down within 15 years of the report. The number of female medical students plummeted as the report recommended the closure of many of the institutions that accepted women; furthermore five historically Black medical schools were closed, and only two remained, struggling for funding compared to other institutions. Medical training in the US remained racially segregated for close to six decades, and the repercussions are still strong today, in deficient access to healthcare, unequal outcomes to a tragic degree, and disproportionately low representation of Black people in medical jobs. Also, Abraham Flexner wrote about Black physicians as if their only use was to keep Black people healthy so they weren’t vectors of disease for white people. The report ensured that medical education was by white men, for white men.
MOYA BAILEY: And in that process, medical students are forming their ideas about who their patients are going to be, and also dealing with their own insecurities about not understanding the practice of medicine very well.
And so then Black women are these foils to what is a largely all white male medical student body, and that comes up in the images and the kinds of narratives that are in medical textbooks in yearbooks, in this moment of the 1910s to the 1920s. And so it was an interesting thing to see Black women represented in medical texts at this time, and then to see those same caricatures and representations in popular culture contemporarily while I was writing my dissertation, so, you know, 2008, 2006. So it was something that really struck me that these are so similar. So why is it that the stereotypes, caricatures of Black women are so persistent and consistent, in that they haven't really changed all that much in that amount of time?
HZ: What to you was the purpose of coming up with a term for misogynoir?
MOYA BAILEY: It's hard to address something if you can't actually name what it is. And I definitely see misogynoir in a lineage with intersectionality and thinking about Kimberlé Crenshaw's need to talk about what happens when racism and sexism come together to create a unique circumstances for people who are multiply marginalized, and how does that affect how they're able to move through the world? So for me, naming misogynoir was a way to talk about this particular antipathy that does not actually affect other women, white women or other women of colour, because it's so specific.
HZ: Moya specifies though that ‘misogynoir’ refers to Black woman and Black nonbinary, agender and gender variant people. It’s a term about people at the intersection of marginalisation on grounds of gender and anti-Black racism.
MOYA BAILEY: It's definitely a unique blend of animosity that I wanted to point out because I do think if we name it, then we're better able to address and grapple with it.
HZ: Do you think it also helps people to identify that it's happening?
MOYA BAILEY: Absolutely. So if we're just talking about misogyny, you know, there are things that we can miss. If that's our only lens of analysis, if we're only looking at the way that women are being poorly treated or represented in horrific ways , we can miss the way that race is also informing those interactions and shaping the kinds of dialogues that occur, and also what sort of remedies we might need. So the remedies for misogynoir look different than perhaps the remedies for regular misogyny.
HZ: There are abundant examples of misogynoir, if you care to look. For instance, a few months ago Alexandra Wilson, a Black lawyer in London, was just trying to go into a courtroom to, you know, do her job, but was mistaken for a defendant. Three times. In one day.
MOYA BAILEY: Most recently people have been talking about misogynoir in relationship to Meghan Markle, the experience of having her unborn child skin discussed, you know, how dark will the child be? And then of course, these early connections and comparisons between Archie and a monkey, you know, that is a very specific anti-Black racist trope that does not get cast on other women of color or white women. I'm just thinking of the British context; I've seen misogynoir used to discuss the treatment of Diane Abbott.
HZ: In 1987, Diane Abbott became the first Black woman to become a member of parliament in the UK, and she’s still in office today; she won her last election with a huge majority. But… every few days her name trends on Twitter, as people deliver racial abuse, body shaming, rape threats, death threats; a report by Amnesty International in 2017 found that Diane Abbott received ten times more abusive tweets than any other MP, and during that year’s election, out of all the abusive tweets sent to female MPs, almost half were directed to her alone. A couple of years ago, her drinking a canned mojito on a tube train received more vociferous criticism than white male MPs taking class A drugs, cheating on their partners, saying openly racist things, doing all manner of financial chicanery and cronyism, pretending they could make a pandemic go away with just a jiggle of the jowls… Hmm, I wonder what the difference could be...
MOYA BAILEY: And one example in the United States that happened in these COVID times was the death of Dr. Susan Moore, who was a practicing physician who started experiencing COVID symptoms and when she went to the hospital, they assumed she was a drug seeker when she was talking about pain that she was experiencing. And I think what is so striking about her case is that she was a physician. She was one of them. And that wasn't enough to make her believable as a patient advocating for herself. And she actually ended up passing away.
So that's the next thing that I'm thinking about is misogynoir in medicine and the real material impacts of the stereotypes about Black women actually playing out on the bodies of Black women, in terms of the care they do and don't receive. And part of that includes thinking about a physician training, healthcare provider training. And even beyond that, some of our deeply embedded beliefs within science and medicine that set up narratives about biological difference between racism and sexism that really harken back to early eugenic ideologies. So really trying to uncover the way that those ideas have not left medicine, but have perhaps been so deeply seated that people don't often notice how they percolate up into treatment and practice contemporarily.
HZ: Although Moya coined ‘misogynoir’ writing her dissertation in 2008, the word caught on because she used it in a blog post for the Crunk Feminist Collective in 2010.
MOYA BAILEY: This was something that I came up with as a graduate student, and because I was a graduate student and I was just involved in online community in a way that I don't imagine many professors are, I think that's part of how the word was able to circulate to a community beyond the ivory tower. And that created this interesting refraction where it's being used in popular online spaces, and then that creates some attention among college students who then pick up the word and want to use it within their classes. And then it starts to pick up some steam in academia. So it's been an interesting ride to see the word sort of boomerang into different spaces.
HZ: Usually, coining a word in an academic paper would be a great way to ensure it doesn’t catch on. But ’misogynoir’ is in the lexicon.
MOYA BAILEY: It has moved into mainstream spaces that I did not think that it would have moved into. Some vocabulary might be jargon that only exists in the academy or in social justice spaces. But just recently misogynoir was on an episode of Charmed, the reboot Charmed that is on, on TV. And Trevor Noah mentioned it on The Daily Show. So I do see the word circulating in spaces that I never would have thought it would have reached. And I do think that that has a lot to do with Black women and other people of colour's real organizing, online and off, to change the terms that we use to talk about organizing and activism.
And I feel like a lot of the unrest and mobilizations that have happened in the US and other parts of the world have pushed this language into mainstream spaces where it hasn't existed previously. So that is one of the things that has changed in this time. It's just the reach and expanse, because it is possible that something trends for a little while, and then it falls out of favor, but it does seem like misogynoir is still reaching people and still being used because it is useful to people in describing what they're experiencing.
HZ: Do people use it correctly?
MOYA BAILEY: Yeah, not often. So sometimes people will try to use 'misogynoir' to talk about just all racism against women of colour. And so that is an inaccurate use of the term. And I've also seen people use misogynoir to talk about just any gender discrimination against Black people and that's not it either.
So I have seen it used in some interesting ways, but I would say for the most part, because the portmanteau is pretty clear that people get it, people get it rather rather quickly.
HZ: I've been collecting portmanteaus for many years, and I get very upset at the ones where I feel like they failed, when you can't tell what the original elements are or when they don't join together in a pleasing way. Which is why this one is pretty unbeatable.
MOYA BAILEY: Oh, thank you.
HZ: Did you encounter any resistance or hostility to the term from places you would not have expected that?
MOYA BAILEY: Ah, good question. Yes! Some initial reactions really did not like that the portmanteau was coming from two different language traditions.
HZ: Er, ‘television' is one of those!
MOYA BAILEY: Absolutely. So there was definitely a initial backlash that did not like that there was this mishmash of languages. Also the spelling: there are folks who are like, "Well, in French ‘noire’ with an E is the feminine version," but I definitely was also trying to signal 'noir' as in 'film noir', so there's a reason the -e is not there. So that was something of a surprise to me that it would be the level of word construction that I would get some pushback.
HZ: Pedants gonna pedant. I think, to be fair to you, when you're coining words for English, even if they have elements from other languages, you don't want to have to import their whole system of suffixes and inflections when English doesn't have those anymore.
MOYA BAILEY: Absolutely.
HZ: Also all languages should get rid of gender anyway, in grammatical terms.
MOYA BAILEY: And then there's that, and then there's that piece.
HZ: Do people ask you, "Why can't you coin a word to describe the specific problems faced by Black men?" Or are you like, "That is someone else's job"?
MOYA BAILEY: Yeah. It's interesting that you asked that. I definitely feel like this misogynoir is an invitation for other people to create the language that speaks to them. If there is new terminology, I think people should definitely try it. But what has been interesting to me is some of the attempts to create other things that feel a little just awkward. Someone tried 'misogynAsian', which was supposed to think about misogyny experienced by Asian people and you know, it unfortunately sounds like 'massage an Asian', which , I feel like that's not what you actually want. So I do think that there are opportunities for folks to find the vocabulary and language that works for them. And I think it just might take take some time to figure out what fits and what works. And it doesn't actually need to be derivative. It can be its own language that speaks to the communities it's it's meant to speak to.
HZ: The thing is, when someone comes up with a portmanteau, people think, "Okay, well we have to stick with that format." Maybe you just made it look too easy. It's hard to coin words.
MOYA BAILEY: Okay. Perhaps that is it? I didn't mean for it to appear easy. I really hope that people feel inspired to play with language and hopefully that what people create helps us get to the world that we want.
HZ: How does it feel to see your creation taking flight?
MOYA BAILEY: It's a bit strange, honestly. I'm really glad that people find it useful. And also it really sucks that it's used so much that its application is so readily apparent is actually a little unsettling. So I'm hopeful that this is perhaps the flourish before the end - if we talk about it a lot now, perhaps that means that we'll get to a place where we can actually transform and get rid of it.
HZ: I was wondering whether you would feel proud because it allows for the voicing of things that are very important or feel terrible because it is needed so much.
MOYA BAILEY: Yes. That is exactly how I've described it. Yes, it is so unfortunate that it is needed so much. And, again: happy that it's something that people have found useful.
HZ: But maybe it's also just because there is a term for it, it allows for the recognition of things that were already there, which feels like increase?
MOYA BAILEY: That's true. It could also be that just having the language presents the opportunity to mark something that is already there. I do think though that having the language also means that there is a greater visibility of Black women and other folks who are experiencing misogynoir, in that visibility has created more opportunities for misogynoir to be unleashed in the world.
HZ: Right. So by defining the concept and talking about the concept, that informs other people who want to enact the concept.
MOYA BAILEY: Absolutely. Absolutely. The double edged sword of that visibility can create opportunities and create more acceptance, but visibility can also lead to more violence because once you are visible, then it makes it that much easier to make you a target. So it's both, both and, always.
HZ: Moya Bailey is an academic, activist and writer, and she has a new book out: Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance, where she provides examples of misogynoir over centuries, and how it can be transformed through creativity and diligence online. Find her work at moyabailey.com.
The Allusionist is an independent podcast and if you like the show then you can support it by recommending it to people who might like it - we all have to use language, right, so might as well spend a little time snuggling up to it. Also, you can contribute to the show financially by becoming a Patreon at patreon.com/allusionist, and if you sign up by the end of June, you get a special treat: in July, I will record the word of your choice for you to use as your alarm or ringtone. If you want to wake up to the sound of me shouting “sausages!” at you, then sign up at patreon.com/allusionist for as little as $2 a month.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is:
exuviae, plural noun, also treated as singular; zoology: the cast or sloughed skin of an animal, especially of an insect larva.
Try using exuviae in an email today. In your Brood X cicada comms?
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with music by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Amanda McLoughlin of Multitude Productions. Find @allusionistshow on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. And to hear or read every episode of the show, get more information about each topic, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
