Moya Bailey

Moya Bailey is an African American feminist scholar, writer, and activist, notable for creating the term misogynoir, which describes a specific form of discrimination experienced by black women. She works with the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and is the co-founder of Quirky Black Girls, a collective for black women who do not fit the cultural stereotype. She uses her words to specifically describe the unequal status of today's black women in society and tries to break this stereotyped discrimination environment. She also worked on the project #tooFEW. The hashtag "FEW" stands for "Feminists Engage Wikipedia" . The objective of this project was to have feminists engage wikipedia pages, both adding and editing information regarding individuals, events and things regarding feminism (with a particular focus on Black feminism) . She received backlash and hate comments taking part in this initiative .

Bailey attended Spelman College for her undergraduate degree. She pursued graduate studies at Emory University in the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and the program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University.

Bailey originally coined the term "misogynoir" in 2008, but first used the term in a 2010 essay entitled "They aren't talking about me ...". The term describes the type of discrimination experienced by black women, specifically the "anti-black racist misogyny that black women experience":

I was looking for precise language to describe why Renisha McBride would be shot in the face, or why The Onion would think it's okay to talk about Quvenzhané the way they did, or the hypervisibilty of Black women on reality TV, the arrest of Shanesha Taylor, the incarceration of CeCe, Laverne and Lupita being left off the TIME list, the continued legal actions against Marissa Alexander, the twitter dragging of black women with hateful hashtags and supposedly funny Instagram images as well as how Black women are talked about in music.