Moya Bailey


Moya Bailey is an African-American feminist scholar, writer, and activist. She is noted for coining the term misogynoir, which denotes what Bailey describes as the unique combination of misogyny and anti-black racism experienced by black women. Bailey is an associate professor at Northwestern University.

Career

Bailey attended Spelman College for her undergraduate degree. She received her doctoral degree from Emory University in the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. After working at Northeastern University as an assistant professor in the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and the program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, she joined the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern.
She works with the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, "an organization that supports and promotes the writer's legacy," and is the co-founder of Quirky Black Girls, a collective for black women who do not fit cultural stereotypes. She also worked on the project #tooFEW. The hashtag "FEW" stands for "Feminists Engage Wikipedia". The objective of this project was to have feminists engage Wikipedia pages, both adding and editing information regarding individuals, events and things regarding feminism. She received backlash and derogatory comments for taking part in this initiative.

''Misogynoir''

Bailey originally coined the term misogynoir in 2008, but first used the term in a 2010 essay entitled "They aren't talking about me...". It is a portmanteau of the word misogyny and noir, the French word for 'black'. Bailey coined the term to describe a unique type of discrimination experienced by black women, specifically the "anti-Black racist misogyny that black women experience, particularly in US visual and digital culture." Since her initial creation of the term, she has elaborated further on the subject in a number of works, and the term has also been adopted by other scholars in fields such as gynecology, rhetoric and communications, and law.
In a 2014 blog post she wrote:

Publications

  • “‘The Illest’: Disability as Metaphor in Hip Hop Music.” Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies: Introductory Concepts, 2016, pp. 36–40, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315643205.