​Black cyberfeminism has been gaining traction as a way to think about black women’s feminist engagement with digital space. Described by Kishonna Leah Gray-Denson in her chapter “Race, Gender, and Virtual Inequality: Exploring the Liberatory Potential of Black Cyberfeminist Theory,” cyberfeminism calls attention to the liberatory potential of digital spaces for feminists, for whom self-determination and expression is deeply important. Gray-Denson provides us the frame of black cyberfeminism, combining articulated qualities of cyberfeminism with black feminist thought. Black cyberfeminism argues that, in the onslaught of negative or negligible representation of black women, the space the Internet can provide for self-definition and self-determination has particularly high stakes and high potential rewards.
 
However, the Internet is not a safe space from the realities of our racist, sexist society. Reminding us of the limitations of black cyberfeminist digital theorizing, Gray-Denson states:
 
As Lorde and Clark (2007) posited, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. This is fundamental reality that those with consciousness recognize: the oppressed will never be given full access to spaces, websites, blogs, social media, and other Internet technologies. Although technologies were never created with the intent to destroy the hegemonic structure, they can provide temporary or partial games in countering the establishment.([1])
 
I work against this critique by arguing that black cyberfeminism is a framework uniquely equipped to engage with the concept of a mediated, complex, contested space where liberation, healing, and black feminist discourse happens. This is because, simply, black feminist discourse always takes place under these tenuous conditions, and digital cultures do not depart from that trend. Black cyberfeminism can work from the black feminist tradition of loving the struggle([2]), of making a way out of no way([3]), and of finding ways to move and speak amongst those who would prefer our silence, obedience, and obliteration.


[1] Gray-Denson, Kishonna Leah. "Race, Gender, and Virtual Inequality: Exploring the Liberatory Potential of Black Cyberfeminist Theory." In Produsing Theory in a Digital World 2.0: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary Theory, 178-79.

[2] Phrase taken from Alice Walker’s definition of a womanist. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

[3] Colloquiual phrase, meant here to reference Monica Coleman’s text Making a Way out of No Way. Coleman, Monica A. Making a Way out of No Way: A Womanist Theology. Minneapolis, Minn,: Fortress Press, 2008.

The recent murders of our trans sisters in Louisiana (Monroe and New Orleans) and Illinois (Chicago) has left us feeling incredibly despondent. The current political discourse surrounding trans folks and bathroom bills has been disturbing, to say the least, but we think it is extremely important to remember that black trans women are being murdered at an alarming rate (and within our own communities). We think that it is constantly important to reiterate that you do not believe in black liberation if you do not believe that all black people should be liberated.

We think that Raquel Willis says it best.