About

Moya Bailey is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on marginalized groups' use of digital media to promote social justice, and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021). She was an MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT for the 2020–2021 academic year.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Art
• Media studies
• Computer Science
• Criminology
• Law
• World Wide Web
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• 3. Homolatent Masculinity and Hip Hop Culture

  2026-02-17

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• Homolatent Masculinity and Hip Hop Culture

  2026-03-31

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• “Black (W)holes” and the Propagation of New Possibilities

  differences · 2024-09-01

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  The starting point of this essay is the author’s acknowledgment that Evelynn Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” has been a throughline for her scholarly and personal development. That relationship to Hammonds’s text and its author shifts, and the changing nature of these connections marks important milestones in Bailey’s academic and adult life. The essay waxes poetic about the substance of Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes” as its meanings exceed its arguments: its very writing serves as a possibility model both in terms of the kind of scholarship Bailey imagined she could write and the kind of life she could live as one keen to bridge Black feminism and medicine. “Black (W)holes” is one of the first academic writings where Bailey saw herself reflected, both in the content presented and in the identities held by Hammonds. Black alphabet children of Spelman College, straddling the line between medical science and feminism, Hammonds and Bailey have much in common. Hammonds’s essay inspired Bailey to want to get to know the now legendary alumna, and this essay recounts how she embarked on a campaign to do so.

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• Book Review: <i>Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire</i> by Akemi Nishida

  Gender & Society · 2023-04-21

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• Friendship, Fellowship, Fury

  Women s Studies in Communication · 2022-10-02

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• An Ethical Internet?

  2022-01-26

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  How can we ethically engage a military-derived technology that has infiltrated every aspect of our lives from refrigerators to furniture? The weaponizing potential of the internet was part and parcel to its initial conceit. Yet, this history is often forgotten and therefore remains unconnected to the current violence that this life-changing technology has enabled around the world.

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• Misogynoir Transformed

  New York University Press eBooks · 2021 · 259 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Gender studies

  Where racism and sexism meet—an understanding of anti-Black misogyny When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir , she defined it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces. She had no idea that the term would go viral, touching a cultural nerve and quickly entering into the lexicon. Misogynoir now has its own Wikipedia page and hashtag, and has been featured on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time . In Misogynoir Transformed , Bailey delves into her groundbreaking concept, highlighting Black women’s digital resistance to anti-Black misogyny on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms. At a time when Black women are depicted as more ugly, deficient, hypersexual, and unhealthy than their non-Black counterparts, Bailey explores how Black women have bravely used social-media platforms to confront misogynoir in a number of courageous—and, most importantly, effective—ways. Focusing on queer and trans Black women, she shows us the importance of carving out digital spaces, where communities are built around queer Black webshows and hashtags like #GirlsLikeUs. Bailey shows how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media. A groundbreaking work, Misogynoir Transformed highlights Black women’s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.

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• New tools, new house: building a black feminist social (justice) media platform

  Feminist Media Studies · 2021-07-04 · 4 citations

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  Danielle “StrugglingToBeHeard” Cole is a Black nonbinary femme who was launched from the relative safety of their Tumblr famous social justice online community into infamy via a viral video reposted to the notoriously unjust, WorldStarHipHop gossip blog. In this excerpt from my book, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press May 2021), I asked Cole about her vision for a social media platform built on Black feminist principles. What would it look and feel like when #BlackLivesMatter was a central tenet of the platform, with queer, trans, nonbinary, agender and gender variant Black folks to the front?

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• The Biomedicalization of Black Life Narratives

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-07-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter takes up the haunting of African American lives by examining the role of biomedicine in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American life writing. For Black people, American biomedicine has always been a haunted house, filled with the ghosts of Black lives lost in the name of racist science and scientific racism. The approach Bailey and Peoples take questions what is knowable under biomedical frameworks. What is prohibited from knowing? What kinds of biographical and historical identities are produced in biomedicine and biomedical narratives? How, if at all, can biomedicine and Black auto/biography produce just and ethical narratives of Black lives and Black futures?

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• The Ethics of Pace

  South Atlantic Quarterly · 2021-04-01 · 76 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Disability studies has continually asked us to rethink the demands on our bodies and time by reminding us that not all humans are able to move and produce in line with these ever-mounting societal expectations. Drawing on the work of disability theorists like Susan Wendell, this article addresses the unique challenges of creating an ethical pace of life for those multiply marginalized by race, gender, sexuality, and ability. The author focuses on her own occupation in the academy and in the field of digital humanities as a necessary case study to argue that, in our social justice visions of the future, we must reimagine the ethics of pace.

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Frequent coauthors

• Ayana Jamieson

  4 shared

• Brooke Foucault Welles

  Northeastern University

  4 shared

• Sarah J. Jackson

  4 shared

• Henry Jenkins

  3 shared

• Danielle Cole

  3 shared

• Alexis Lothian

  University of Maryland, College Park

  3 shared

• Izetta Autumn Mobley

  3 shared

• Nico Carpentier

  Charles University

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

  Emory University

  2013

• B.A., Comparative Women's Studies

  Spelman College

  2005

Awards & honors

• MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT (2020–2021)
• co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender J…
• author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resi…