Student Submission CUNY Hunter College Spring 2025

Digital Comic Strip – Guess Who’s the Most Disrespected Person in America by Lorie Lamont

Final Reflection –

Words are so powerful. I know this because I’ve gone from feeling voiceless when it came to expressing my experiences with misogynoir to being able to confidently identify misogynoiristic discourse and explain why it’s harmful. While this might seem natural to those who already have the vocabulary, I didn’t have access to those tools until I took this class.

My final project, a digital comic strip inspired by the viral “This Is Fine” meme, represents the constant stress that comes with being a Black woman online. The details in my digital comic strip also encapsulate a bit of how I feel as a Black woman navigating online spaces, witnessing digital violence being done to other women like me, while already bearing trauma and managing the issues in the outside world. The tiredness and frustration that comes with this is something I and so many others know too well. I wanted to focus more on how this specific kind of hate feels inescapable and never-ending digitally.

Being a Black woman with any sort of platform online means you might be faced with hypermasculinization, hypersexualization, stereotypes, casual harm, negative imagery, and countless other acts rooted in anti-Blackness and sexism. Before working on this project, I genuinely would have said that the best you could do to mitigate misogynoir as a Black woman is to block people and try to be invisible online. While that might work for some, it shouldn’t be the sole choice for Black women, nor should all of the accountability fall on our laps. Black women should be able to express themselves on these platforms without fear of hate, violence, or silencing. Meanwhile, there are people online who choose to be the source of this abuse and never deal with the consequences. Black women are constantly targeted because we’re not seen or treated as people who deserve respect based on ideas that were forced onto us. It’s crazy how this can follow us to this day and be the leading cause behind all of the harm done to us. 

There needs to be more unlearning, and more Black women (and educated folks of other races.. Y’all aren’t exempt) on the teams that create and moderate digital spaces. Social media platforms have to take more responsibility by enforcing rules that actually protect people from misogynoir. Too often, it’s the victims and advocates who get shadowbanned just for using certain words, while the people spreading hate go unpunished. Platforms need to update their terms and conditions to reflect anti-Black and anti-sexist policies and improve their moderation tools to catch misogynoiristic language. Additionally, everyone should be able to curate their social media experience without being forced to see harmful content. There are so many potential ideas that I can bring to the table to prevent the trauma of misogynoir from being passed down however, these are just a few!

This project, along with everything I’ve learned in class, helped me understand truly how deep misogynoir runs online and how necessary it is to hold these platforms accountable, as well as all perpetrators of misogynoir. You can trust that the work to dismantle these cycles of harm will be on my mind as I use modern social media platforms in my work and personal life.