As a Black womyn, on a journey to being liberated in all aspects and “gainfully employed” in academia (as my close friend Jah would say), I find myself wrestling with what is appropriate for me to write, share and retweet on my personal social media accounts.
As an active Twitter user since 2009, I’ve tweeted about lots of different things, including terrible heartbreaks from my personal relationships, my parents’ divorce and even getting into college.
However, as the intense rise of social media activism took place around 2013, following the murder of Michael Brown, and after some would even say the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, I started to engage with many young, prominent, successful Black journalists, scholars and activists.
As I got older, around my sophomore year of college, my participation in the “Black Twittersphere” was in full force. I realized that I was on a journey to getting all the “follow-backs” from my “problematic favs” and role models.
Mind you, these role models include professors whose work I admire, have read and follow. However, what I didn’t notice at the time was, as badly as I wanted that “follow-back,” there was an inevitable yet subliminal silencing that came with it.
Recently, I found myself noticing that some things, particularly relating to sex, are “inappropriate” for me to tweet about. Although no one has ever criticized me for anything I’ve tweeted yet, I feel as though they don’t have to because I stop myself. I know I follow in the Black feminist tradition — popular Black feminists like Feminista Jones are tweeting casually about sex whether it be personally or generally — there is a voice in the back of my mind that says, “Nope girl, you can’t say that” before I hit the send button on any sex-driven or related tweet.
Some contemporary socio-cultural critics and scholars would argue that Black feminists are beginning to engage with a few new components as a part of the collective Black feminist ideology, which they refer to as fat-positive and sex-positive.
As a Black millennial, who went through high school and a bit of college watching some of my friends being slut-shamed and fat-shamed because of their own personal sexual liberation and body type, I think that these new components are very important.
This is particularly true given the historical relationship between Black womyns’ bodies, agency and ownership. However, it seems as though I am not at liberty, as a younger scholar, to tweet specifically about sex-positivity because of the respectability that exists within the ivory tower of academia.
The reality of my feeling silenced in this way is linked to the stigma and discomfort that exists when having conversations about sex, especially open and uncensored ones.
My experience as a Black womyn navigating undergrad has been to make sure every “i” is dotted perfectly and every “t” is crossed without any slants.
While participating in a nationwide summer research symposium this past summer in Stamford, Conn., the atmosphere was if you’re going to be a Black womyn in academia, you have to be willing to align yourself perfectly with the standards and expectations of the system.
However, these standards and expectations do not necessarily allow for sex-positivity, even grounded in a strong theoretical framework like Black Feminist Thought.
Yet, I feel that these types of conversations, especially in the context of Black feminist ideology, and feminist ideology, as a whole, are important.
I believe that the de-stigmatization of sex is significant and important work particularly as Black womyn continue to move toward psychological, emotional and sexual liberation from a system that has maintained bondage over them for centuries.
In my opinion, academia is the perfect place to begin the deconstruction of these violent ideologies as opposed to being a place that maintains them or suppresses the danger that they present.
Emerald Rutledge, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at ERutledge17@wooster.edu.