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Some Thoughts on the Queer Eye Reboot

“Frankly, many of these men could be better served if there were a licensed therapist among the Fab Five,” she said, referring to the nickname for hosts Antoni Porowski, Bobby Berk, Karamo Brown, Jonathan Van Ness, and Tan France, who are food, design, lifestyle, grooming, and wardrobe coaches, respectively.

Some of my thoughts on the  Queer Eye Reboot.

On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism

This piece has been years in the making! So grateful for you @thetrudz!

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, our writing not cited, or our words plagiarized by people who find the word compelling. It

 is not surprising that misogynoir would be enacted against the Black women who brought the word to public acclaim but it is nonetheless troubling. This is not to say that every time the word is used, our names need to be mentioned, but it does matter that our intellectual interventions are understood in proper context. In

this article, we interview each other and discuss the ramifications of the naming of misogynoir in digital media and its impact on our own lives.

Read the full piece here.

 

The Flexner Report: Standardizing Medical Students Through Region-, Gender-, and Race-Based Hierarchies

I’m proud to have an article in this special issue of the American Journal of Law & Medicine.  It is a treat to be published alongside scholars I really admire like Ruha Benjamin, Khiara M. Bridges, Terence KeelOsagie K. Obasogie, Patricia J. Williams,  Lundy Braun, and more!

Here’s a taste:

A black and white photo of Abraham Flexner
Abraham Flexner
In 1910, Abraham Flexner, a leading U.S. educational scholar, took on a task issued by the Carnegie Foundation to assess the curricular components of medical schools in the United States and Canada. His groundbreaking report transformed the practice of educating doctors, making institutions more standardized and uniform in their aim to educate the next generations of physicians. It is through his work that medical doctors became well-respected professionals with extensive and complex training.

To read the entire article click here.

Palimpsests in the Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler: A Palimpsest Special Issue

A Close up headshot of Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler

It’s here! Just in time for the holidays!

Ayana Jamieson and I labored for two years to get this special issue out and we are so glad that it is finally here! Please enjoy!

Award winning author Octavia E. Butler crafted a life as unique as any of her stories. Regarded as the grand dame of Afrofuturism, Butler is also the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant for her fiction and nonfiction writing. Born in 1947, in Pasadena, CA, June 22, 2017 would be have been her 70th birthday. As one of the first recognizable Black feminist science fiction writers to date, Butler had an illustrious career despite lackluster grades in primary school. She set her intention to become a writer at an early age and worked diligently to propel herself forward. She developed a process that she called “positive obsession” and wrote every day to advance her craft. She wrote at least sixteen novels (including a few have never been published), short stories and essays, and is heralded as one of the most influential Black speculative fiction writers in the world. This special issue of the journal Palimpsest celebrates her life and legacy by introducing and bringing to the fore scholarly work that is inspired by her science fiction.

Palimpsest was the obvious choice for this special issue as the palimpsest is an implicit theme in Butler’s work. Palimpsest describes the traces of previously erased or overwritten writing that show through in the newest versions of the work. We see this practice in Butler’s writing with historical texts, concepts, and conventions bleeding through to the present and into the future through time travel, genetic ancestry, and muscle memory.

Read the special issue here!

Towards a Black Feminist Health Science Studies by Moya Bailey and Whitney Peoples

Black feminist health science studies (BFHSS) is a product of Hamer’s clarion call to attend to Black peoples’ health and wellness as an integral part of social justice labor. As such, BFHSS critically intervenes in 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 for a theory of BFHSS that builds on social justice science, which has as its focus the health and well-being of marginalized groups. We would like to move towards a social justice science that understands the health and well-being of people to be its central purpose. This formulation of BFHSS provides evidence of the co-constitutive nature of medical science and popular perception, underscoring the need to engage them simultaneously. Health is both a desired state of being and a social construct necessary of interrogation because race, gender, ablebodiedness, and other aspects of cultural production profoundly shape our notions of what is healthy (Metzl & Kirkland, 2010).

More here!

#GirlsLikeUs: Trans advocacy and community building online by Sarah J Jackson, Moya Bailey, Brooke Foucault Welles

Excited this piece is out!

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 trans women of color, represents the vanguard of struggles over self-definition. We find that trans women on Twitter, led by Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, and in response to histories of misrepresentation and ongoing marginalization and violence, deliberately curate an intersectional networked counterpublic that works to legitimize and support trans identities and advocate for trans autonomy in larger publics and counterpublics.

Read it here!

Hello, again!

It has been an incredibly long time again.

I am happy to report that I have accepted the position of assistant professor in the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and the program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. My work focuses on Black women’s use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion.

When Margins Become Centered: Black Queer Women in Front and Outside of the Classroom

My co-authored piece with my colleague Shannon Nasah-Miller, When Margins Become Centered: Black Queer Women in Front and Outside of the Classroom is live in the Special Issue Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University of Feminist Formations.

Heres our abstract

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 the college classroom while simultaneously negotiating universities that have very little space for queer women, Black women, and those at these intersections. The article asserts that feminist classrooms are arenas for discovery, liberation, and resistance of hegemonic structures, and attempts to construct these spaces both in- and outside of women’s studies departments. This task is particularly challenging when the instructor holds the very marginalized identities that exist in the content of the class and their education. Ultimately, the article argues that their unique experience has been under-theorized, even by them, and necessitates specific strategies that would not be addressed by a focus on Black women who are assumed to be straight or queer women who are assumed to be white.

Read the full article here!