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.
“Black (W)holes” and the Propagation of New Possibilities
moya bailey is a professor at Northwestern University and the founder of the Digital Apothecary and cofounder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. 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 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021).
Moya Bailey; “Black (W)holes” and the Propagation of New Possibilities. differences 1 September 2024; 35 (2): 184–192. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-11259661
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