Tea Talk: 'Miss Me with the Misogynoir': Combating Anti-Black Gendered Racism through Black Women's Literature, Poetry, and Music 

The first Tea Talk of 2021 — “Miss Me with the Misogynoir": Combating Anti-Black Gendered Racism through  Black Women's Literature, Poetry, and Music — will be presented by Dr. Ashley Burge.

The annual Tea Talks are sponsored by Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies.

Description: Malcolm X famously said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman."

Black women have been historically plagued by what Moya Bailey calls "misogynoir,” the "anti-black racist misogyny that Black women experience."

This talk will explore Black women's literature, poetry, essays, and music as avenues of empowerment in the midst of anti-Black gendered racism.

Dr. Burge will explore early American and Reconstruction activists Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells, contemporary literary artists Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Audre Lorde, and contemporary music artists Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion to show how Black women continue to challenge one-dimensional, denigrating constructs of Black womanhood.

Dr. Ashley Burge is an assistant professor of African American literature at Augustana College. Her teaching and research emphasize the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class and their connection to Black feminism, the Black body, and ecocriticism.

She has published essays in the North Carolina Literary Review, The Encyclopedia of African American Culture, the MLA Approaches to Teaching series, and the anthology "Through Mama's Eyes." Her current book project uses Toni Morrison's oeuvre to create a theoretical paradigm that transmutes Black trauma into healing, catharsis, and redemption. She is currently developing courses on the full works of Toni Morrison and on Black horror in literature and film.