Entry · catalog no. 3007
misogynoir
/ /mɪˌsɑdʒəˈnwɑr/ /mih-SOJ-uh-nwahr
noun · nationwide / internet · 2000s
✓ Verified
1.
Anti-Black misogyny directed at Black women, especially as it shows up in popular, visual and digital culture — the caricatures, dismissals and disproportionate hostility that racism alone or sexism alone does not account for. The word was built to describe a harm that existing vocabulary kept splitting in half.
“Every critique of her was about her tone and her body — that is not criticism, that is misogynoir.”
Origin & Attribution
Coined by Moya Bailey, a Black queer feminist scholar, in 2008 while a graduate student — a portmanteau of misogyny and the French noir. Its first published use was her March 2010 essay for the Crunk Feminist Collective. The writer Trudy, who published as @thetrudz, was central to developing and circulating it; Bailey and Trudy later documented that history themselves. Correct two standing errors: it is not anonymous internet slang, and it is not a Crenshaw coinage or a synonym for intersectionality.
2008
Moya Bailey coins the term in graduate work
2010
First public use, in a Crunk Feminist Collective essay published March 14
2018
Bailey and Trudy publish on the term''s citation and erasure in Feminist Media Studies
2021
Misogynoir Transformed published by NYU Press
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
nationwide / internet · 2000s
Spoken by
Black feminist writers and scholars; carried widely on Black Twitter
$MISOGYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising6 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
78/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2008
in the culture
Mainstream crossover
2014
search interest spikes
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism, Moya Bailey & Trudy — Feminist Media Studies 18(4) · 2018
archive-desk
■
+ Cite a sourceMisogynoir Transformed: Black Women''s Digital Resistance, Moya Bailey — NYU Press · 2021
archive-desk
See also