Moya Bailey is a postdoctoral scholar of Women’s Studies and Digital Humanities at Northeastern University. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She currently curates the #transformDH Tumblr initiative in Digital Humanities. She is also the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.
This is the source
My research highlights the networks contemporary Black trans women create through the
production of digital media and in this article I make the emotional and
uncompensated labor of this community visible. I provide an added level of insight
into my research process as a way to mirror the access I was granted by these
collaborators. I use Digital Humanist Mark Sample’s concept of
Enacting a transformative feminist process of writing and research within the digital humanities
As I began to work on my book,
The networks built through digital media production are significant attempts to redress the lack of care that Black trans women receive from the health care community and society. I argue that these processes of digital media production produce more than just redefined representations but also connections that can be understood as a form of health care praxis themselves. To reach these conclusions I have charted a new methodology that incorporates theoretical perspectives from Black queer theory, digital humanities, and feminist theory and transforms my relationship to the people producing these digital representations.
Media and cultural studies scholars have long understood the epistemological and
pedagogical significance of popular media
I focus on Mock’s use of the hashtag because I sought and achieved her permission to
work on the project. I parse my process for achieving informed consent and how it
differs from the paternalism of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process. I
acknowledge the negotiated terms under which this project is discussed to signal my own
queer feminist praxis in conducting this research. I build towards an understanding of
what I call
Alchemy is the
Black trans women negotiate unique threats to life and health as those multiply marginalized by gender, race, sexuality, and the disproportionate amounts of violence their communities face. On December 5, 2014, Deshawnda Sanchez, a Los Angeles area Black trans woman, was killed while trying to escape her murderer. Her death was one of 225 murders of trans women in 2014. The LGBTQ magazine
These acts of violence also coincide with increasing visibility and advocacy by trans women of color, particularly through digital media outlets and in online media. In 2012, Mock was moved to become a more outspoken trans activist because of the rise in the number of murders and suicides of queer and trans youth. She has used her platform as a former web editor for
not being a natural born female
So I shared Jenna’s petition on Twitter, and said: Please sign & share this women's rights petition in support of transgender beauty queen Jenna Talackova & #girlslikeus: ow.ly/9TYc6 27 Mar 12 And that was the online birth of #girlslikeus. I didn’t think it over, it wasn’t a major push, but #girlslikeus felt right. Remarkably a few more women — some well-known, others not — shared the petition and began sharing their stories of being deemed un-real, being called out, working it, fighting for what’s right, wanting to transition, dreaming to do this, accomplishing that... #girlslikeus soon grew beyond me... my dream came true: #girlslikeus was used on its own without my @janetmock handle in it. It had a life of its own.
Other trans women have embraced the tag, including Laverne Cox; they use it to discuss everything from the desire to transition and the violence of being outed in unsafe situations as well as the banality of everyday living and dreams of job success.
Computational Scientist Alan Mislove created a database that collects a random ten
percent of all tweets tweeted since Twitter began. As scholars in sociology and DH
have noted, a ten percent sample of such a large database can provide statically
significant information about the representative population
These hashtags fluctuated in use over this two year period, with #transgender having fallen below its initial prevalence and #twoc significantly increasing.
Words related to representation were very popular, ultimately marking the content of
nearly every tenth tweet. Variations of the words
For example, Janet Mock in May of 2013 attended the celebration of Laverne Cox’s Time
magazine cover, captioning their photo together, Celebrating Laverne Cox’s time cover tonight in NYC.
Sisterhood in action! #girlslikeus
Though celebrating a friend’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine is not something that we can necessarily relate to, celebrating friends and their success through posting a picture on Twitter is very common. I won’t provide visual referents of the types of images that these daily life photos subvert, but think about the trauma and violence that befalls Dil in
Given the frequent attacks on trans women, particularly trans women of color, I wanted to be sure that my scholarly inquiries about the hashtag were welcome and did not bring undue negative attention to the community. I reached out to Mock via Twitter to see if she was interested in my researching the tag. I told her I was interested in how it has been used and what sorts of actions have developed through its use. She said she would be excited for me to work on the project. I also asked her what sort of information would be most useful to her to know about the hashtag. She was specifically interested in the most popular retweets and users along with gathering a sense of where the hashtag has shown up in mainstream media.
Though Mock welcomed my research on the hashtag, I wanted to give her the opportunity to say no to the project. My own interest was not enough justification for pursuing this type of potentially risky research that could expose an already vulnerable community to more vitriol and negative visibility. Trans women of color are not understood as one of the vulnerable communities identified by the Institutional Review Board that assesses the potential harms of academic research on those researched. The IRB recognizes prisoners, people with diminished capacity, women, particularly in their capacity as potential child bearers, and minors themselves as populations that could be unduly harmed by human subjects research. Trans women of color are represented within these populations yet are not recognized as their own contingent in need of more nuanced ethical study. I don’t wish to see trans women of color represented in this list of vulnerable populations; however, I do think that the IRB's mandate to cause no undue harm to research participants requires researchers to think more carefully about emergent communities where people’s very humanity is being questioned in society writ large.
The intentions of the IRB are quite noble and necessary. IRBs are charged with
ensuring that human subjects research conducted at institutions that receive federal
resources is ethical and does not cause harm to participant many prospective subjects are vulnerable to a range of
decisional defects or impairments that render them unable to protect their own
interests, and thus we are right not to rely exclusively on informed
consent
Social media users are not the traditionally infantilized research subjects that the IRB assumes. As people who are actively engaged in the ongoing generation of their digital content, social media users require a level of forethought that extends beyond the purview of the IRB. While IRB review might be able to forestall some of the harms that are involved in academic research, issues of consent beyond an initial yes to participate in a research project or plans to address issues that may not be anticipated by the IRB are obfuscated.
Previous studies have attempted to address IRB paternalism and its impact on research
subjects in several ways. In the social sciences, there have been efforts to shift
research from a top down orientation to one that is side to side or bottom up
By speaking with Mock, before even designing my research plan, I ensured that the findings are useful to her as the creator of the hashtag. In addition to speaking with Mock directly, I spoke with my online community of friends and activists to create an advisory panel. I reached out to Black women and queer thought leaders within the arenas of Twitter and Tumblr, which included a diverse group of activist, artists, and academics, who have created some of the most popular hashtags related to social justice issues. Twitter and Tumblr users like Sydette Harry and Jamie Nesbitt Golden have been central to the creation and popularity of many social justice related hashtags. Many of them have direct experience with journalists and scholars using their social media posts without their consent. These incidents range from annoying to outright dangerous. Many amongst this group of twelve have had their work stolen by journalists, interpreted by scholars all without attempting to contact them. They have experienced rape and death threats for simply voicing their opinions online. Given these histories, I did not want to repeat a pattern of beginning work without asking for permission first nor giving them the opportunity to ask their own research questions.
I plan to ask within the networks using #girlslikeus what users think about the project and what questions they want answered about how it moves through cyberspace and the world. Even though tweets are understood as public, I err on the side of privacy and anonymity for Twitter users of the hashtag. I will not use the handles of users without first attempting to contact them. By allowing Twitter users to shape the project and their participation at multiple points, I create a more flexible process, one that is dynamic and shifting. But the collaboration doesn’t end there.
My experience with issues of ongoing consent suggests that the way we do digital
humanities needs to shift. Digital Humanists interested in conducting research that
is ethical and feminist must go beyond the simple politics of citation, as citation
itself may be the thing that creates the harm to the community. As noted in The
#TwitterEthics Manifesto, both
academics and journalists should ask each individual user on Twitter for consent.
They should explain the context and the usage of their tweets
I sent the potential members of my advisory committee an email asking if they’d like to participate. Those who agreed were invited to join a listserv where I post questions and solicit help as needed. While this group was initially created to ensure that my work was ethical and useful, it has already been repurposed for needs I could not anticipate. One member of the group is an internationally renowned journalist. She queried the collaborators, asking for their thoughts on a story she was writing about the ways that the media has represented Black people, particularly Black women in coverage of the Ebola outbreak. Many in the group responded to her request, providing important quotes that shaped her article in really helpful ways. When I envisioned the group, I imagined what I could do for them and what they could do for me. Even in creating a collaborative space it didn’t occur to me that there might be things that we could collectively do for another member of the circle. I knew what I wanted from the group and assumed that I could anticipate the group’s needs from me. However, this emergent need and purpose for the group was possible through the creation of the network itself. Even before I could use the network in the way I envisioned, my collaborators were able to leverage it to meet their own needs.
Stressing a non-hierarchal circular collaboration is what helped make this possible.
I had transformed the traditional top down approach of my research but I had only
imagined a relationship that was side by side, a horizontal relationship with me on
one side and my collaborators on the other. This moment allowed for the realization
that we had co-created a three dimensional space with multiple directions of flow.
What I appreciate about the language of
Those of us who participated in interviews for the journal article were not
compensated, and there were a few minor errors in the article that I believe in
another context would have been hurtful. However, the initial transparent ask, the
openness to feedback, the knowledge that we were all participating in a process that
extends beyond the published article and even my book, created a level of trust that
allowed for forgiveness and correction among peers. Many of these collaborators have
experienced the unsolicited appropriation of their words by people they did not know.
By developing a new community, albeit a short lived one, the power differentials
among the members are mitigated. While I still maintain epistemic privilege as the
gatherer and convener of this circle, I am interested in using that privilege for the
collective good
Because academic books make very little money, I endeavored to find meaningful ways to compensate this group for their work and time. This includes using university research money to help convene gatherings for existing digital networks that may have trouble connecting in another capacity. Creating a fund from honoraria received in relationship to the work, in addition to coauthoring articles with interested collaborators. are a few of the ways I am exploring transforming my relationship to my collaborators. I’ve been able to leverage my position within academic communities to write grants that include budget opportunities for these collaborators and more. As the project continues I am creating more opportunities that challenge the ways that researchers have traditionally compensated and shared in the benefits that come from doing research.
One of the important aspects of DH work is the emphasis on collaboration. Scholars in
the humanities are still primarily rewarded for single author texts. Tenure and
promotion committees regard books and articles that have one author more favorably
than mutli-authored texts. One of the ways that DH is creating a different
methodological practice is by supporting connection through collaboration across
multiple aspects of digital projects. Digital Humanist Mark Sample discusses this
idea in relationship to student work through his concept [B]y collaborative construction, I mean a collective effort to build something
new, in which each student’s contribution works in dialogue with every other
student’s contribution. A key point of collaborative construction is that the
students are not merely making something for themselves or for their professor.
They are making it for each other, and, in the best scenarios, for the outside
world
I adapt this idea of collaborative construction such that it has import outside the realm of the classroom; it is critical to the way that I shape my research project. Consequently, a transformation of the goals of my academic work was necessary, as well as my relationship to the usually distinct categories of research subject, researcher, and audience.
My work has multiple audiences. There are scholars in fields like women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and digital humanities who might be interested understanding the networks contemporary Black trans women create through the production of digital media. However I am interested in creating a book that also and perhaps most importantly, is useful to the communities on which my examples draw. More than just the world outside the academy, I want to create a resource for the communities with whom I am collaborating on the research. This practice involves a more intentional form of collaboration than I have attempted before.
I am creating a new way of practicing the relationships I am developing through my
the advisory panel, transforming a researcher/researched relationship into one of
collaboration, thereby shifting out of the position of researcher into a more equal
role. This process also includes developing new models of expressing the value of
everyone’s contributions. For me, the process is the product, meaning that the
process itself is productive, creative, and transformative of the conditions we are
seeking to understand through the research
The example of trans women of color’s digital activism demonstrate the power of digital media to redefine representations of marginalized groups and their ability to impact a white supremacist, heterosexist, and trans misogynist media culture without that being their primary goal. The practices of reclaiming the screens of our computers and phones with content is not simply one of creating new representations but is a practice of self-preservation and health promotion through the networks of digital media. While often celebrated for the rehabilitated images, this media is not often interrogated as processes that support the development of community and individual health strategies. Trans women of color aren’t simply naming the violence they experience but are building networks of support and recognition for their work that helps them have safer environments in which to live.
I understand trans women of color’s production of media as an act of
self-preservation and one of health praxis that is not centered on appeals to a
majority audience. The creation of media by minoritarian subjects about themselves
and for themselves can be a liberatory act. These acts of image redefinition actually
engender different outcomes for marginalized groups and the processes by which they
are created build networks of resilience that far outlives the relevant content.
Black women and queer and trans folks reconstruct representations through
#Girlslikeus rejects the assimilationist invisibility of another potential hashtag like #imagirltoo, in favor of a declaration that makes trans women the undeniable center of their own project, where they are their own referents, not cis women. #Girlslikeus signals a conversation that is for, by, and about trans women and not their proximity to another group of relative power. #Girlslikeus exemplifies the magic of digital alchemy through this practice of shifting from margin to center utilizing established mediums to create literally transformative realities.
The added benefit of creating this community online is that it is visible to those outside the identity and does the work of humanizing inadvertently and without draining energy from the more important work of supporting each other. Digital media is creating and supporting a network of connection among communities that have traditionally had trouble finding each other let alone reaching a larger audience. By doing the work of community building online, groups are leveraging both visibility and education at once. Trans women of color are telling their own stories but in the process are forcing more recognition for their identities in mainstream publics.
As a member of the Allied Media Projects community, I have been shaped by the
organization’s values and principles. Allied Media Projects mission is to cultivate media strategies for a more just and creative
world
(n.d.). The annual Allied Media Conference that highlights work from
activists, artists, and organizers in service of this mission, highlights the words
Create
Transform
I offer these questions as a starting place for conducting digital research within a
feminist ethical frame. I am reminded of Octavia Butler’s aphorism all you touch you change; all you change,
changes you
The Research Justice collective at the AMC frames their work with the question is this
I want my research to be
Gayor
Trans PanicDefenses Are Crap And Now Illegal In California.
All That You Touch You Change:Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.