“Welcome back to my channel, it’s your girl Jackie Aina!” Nigerian American YouTuber Jackie Aina opens every video with the same line, followed by a theme song she sings herself. Aina’s channel provides valuable insight into how race and gender intersect in digital feminized spaces. Since starting her YouTube channel in 2009, she has gained over 3.75 million subscribers, and her videos have over 384 million total views. Aina was the first dark-skinned Black woman in the beauty genre on YouTube to reach one million subscribers (E! News). She has been on the cover of Essence magazine and was the first YouTuber to be recognized at the NAACP Image Awards, receiving the first-ever “YouTuber of the Year” award (Carlos 2019; Simmons 2018). Aina has continued to grow her platform as one of the few dark-skinned beauty and lifestyle content creators who also speaks out against racism in the industry. This hypervisibility has enabled Aina to reach wider audiences but also renders her more vulnerable to online harassment, which is compounded by her racial and gender identities. This article presents Aina’s content as a case study to explore how Black women navigate hypervisibility and digital labor in online spaces. On one hand, hypervisibility allows Black women to connect and find each other and to form new representations amidst problematic media and social stereotypes. On the other, it leaves Black women extremely vulnerable to online harassment and violence. I present this paradox as the “precarity of visibility,” a framework that illuminates the tensions between the benefit of hypervisibility and the harm of online harassment.

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This article also considers how algorithmic bias and online harassment are inextricably linked to race and gender by examining Aina’s digital experiences as a Black woman and digital content creator. I discuss how Aina herself describes her experiences online, from receiving racist comments to the physical and emotional labor she expends to monitor and protect her space. Aina performs multiple levels of paid and unpaid labor by building affective communities with her audience, navigating racism and algorithmic bias online, and protecting her digital spaces from racial and gender-based violence. My analysis aims to illuminate the significant gaps in discussions surrounding digital content creators and racialized feminized labor that often render Black women, their labor, and their contributions invisible. 

I begin with a literature review that discusses networked harassment and misogynoir, aspirational and feminized labor, and Black cyberfeminism. Using Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) and textual analysis of Aina’s YouTube videos from 2018 to 2021, I illustrate how Aina incorporates her identity as a Black woman and her personal experiences with online and offline racism into her videos, applying the precarity of visibility framework to explore the roles that Aina’s racial and gender identities play in her experiences online as well as the digital feminized labor she performs. Aina’s content is a valuable case study to explore how beauty and lifestyle content is more than skin deep; Aina’s identities are deeply enmeshed in her approach to makeup and the content she creates, in addition to the invaluable “tea” (Black queer/AAVE for gossip and updates, ultimately valuable information) she prepares and shares with her online community.

Networked Harassment and Misogynoir

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Digital technologies operate with an assumed white, heterosexual, cisgender, masculinized audience; thus, the experiences and contributions of marginalized communities in digital spaces are often erased or ignored. The internet is part of the social structure that created it, and the racialization Black folks experience in digital spaces “mimics segregation that users likely encounter or live in offline” (Williams 2017, 281). Safiya Umoja Noble states that “racism and sexism are part of the architecture and language of technology” (2018, 9); Rena Bivens and Oliver L. Haimson describe the infrastructure of digital spaces as having oppressive cultural norms and values “baked” in (2016). The most popular social media sites were not created by Black people, nor do they prioritize Black users. Thus, Black social media users must adopt, appropriate, and modify digital platforms to fit their needs (Williams 2017, 280). Online spaces can be extremely hostile for Black women who experience harassment based on their race and gender. Alice E. Marwick and Robyn Caplan use the term “networked harassment” to describe large-scale online attacks specifically targeting marginalized users like women of color (2018). This violence is rarely questioned because of the dominant cultural assumption that technology is neutral. Algorithmic bias and platform vulnerabilities are oversimplified as “glitches” in the system, but Black women’s disproportionate experiences support Lisa Nakamura’s assertion that racism is not a “glitch” but rather a feature of digital platforms (Noble 2018, 82; Nakamura 2013). 

Caitlin E. Lawson studied online spaces during the promotion of the Ghostbusters (2016) reboot featuring an all-woman cast (2018). While the white leads received sexist comments and harassment online, Leslie Jones, the film’s only Black lead, received both racist and sexist comments. In an act of networked harassment fueled primarily by white conservative men, Jones was doxxed. Her personal website was hacked, and images of her were replaced with images of gorillas. Her private accounts were also hacked, and personal information from her passport and driver’s license were shared online (Lawson 2018, 819). The magnitude of violence Jones experienced in comparison to her white castmates was due to her intersecting identities as a Black woman. Even worse, online spaces do not have systems in place to protect Black women and other vulnerable communities from harassment, and thus render the violence invisible. This is one example of many that proves that platforms themselves cannot keep Black women safe. The solutions (telling Black women to simply log off, delete comments, or block perpetrators) are only band-aids on a larger social illness that often do not stick. To assume that digital spaces are neutral and egalitarian only allows misogyny and racism to continue to run rampant.

Aspirational Labor

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Coined by Brooke Erin Duffy, aspirational labor is affective, gendered, and based on the principle that being able to “do what you love” is not actually work (2016, 2017). The promise of flexibility and being your own (girl) boss seduces many into trading hours of uncompensated labor for the promise of creative and personal freedom (Pham 2015, 172). Aspirational labor is often underpaid or uncompensated and minimized by rhetorics of passion; it is work feminized digital laborers engage in because they believe it will pay off in the long run. In addition, the “cultural feminization of economic life” turns emotional connections into commodities (Baym 2015, 15). Content creators must engage in emotional and relational labor, engaging with their audiences and maintaining online and offline relationships. This practice is a part of a long lineage of “women’s work” being defined through affective labor, or the “production and management of emotions” (Pham 2015, 187). Being a successful fashion, beauty, or lifestyle content creator means concealing the labor that goes into the production of content and the maintenance of relationships online while making it all look effortless. The supposed neoliberal meritocracy of digital spaces encourages aspirational labor: online success is something anyone can achieve if they are passionate and work hard enough, while simultaneously making all the work involved invisible. 
 

Visibility is a requirement for online creators; the more active and visible you are online, the easier it becomes to gain followers and subscribers and ultimately build a successful and financially viable platform. The incitement of digital culture industries to “put yourself out there” as a means to success poses additional risks for Black women. The culture of the digital gig economy that encourages visibility also “justifies” the abuse and harassment these creators receive online because it is considered part of the job. As the Leslie Jones example proves, hate is also a commodity that often goes unregulated by platforms because it creates engagement and, ultimately, profit (Sutherland 2017). The compounding of sexism and racism directed at Black women in digital and visual culture has been defined by Moya Bailey as “misogynoir” (2021). Thus, Black women’s bodies are subject to even more policing and surveillance online. Because their careers heavily center on the body and rely on conventional standards of attractiveness (read: whiteness and thinness), content creators’ appearances are frequently publicly scrutinized. Duffy explains that many (white) content creators recognize that dealing with hate and trolls is part of the job (2017, 26). But for white creators, these comments are often not direct, violent attacks on their racial identities. Black women creators must navigate both sexism, which objectifies and sexualizes feminized bodies, and racism, which renders Black bodies as deviant in opposition to whiteness (Noble 2018, 92). 

Black Cyberfeminism 

Black women’s digital content creation continues the legacy of Black women as storytellers and culture keepers. Analyzing material from oral histories to web 2.0 bloggers to social media activists, influencers, vloggers, and content creators, Kishonna Gray explains that Black women “have always utilized mediated platforms” as sites for discussing experiences and as venues for resistance (2020, 71). Despite vulnerabilities and online harassment, Black women continue to gather online to openly discuss, contest, and affirm facets of Black identity in spaces outside of dominant hegemonic media culture. Online spaces facilitate discourse between creators and audiences and allow Black women to engage in positive self-talk and engage in the Black feminist practice of “talking back” to harmful stereotypes and representations while validating their own experiences and identities (Steele 2016). 
 

Despite the growing body of scholarship on digital and aspirational feminized labor, much of this scholarship centers young, white, cisgender, heterosexual, upper-class women. An intersectional approach illuminates the affective and aspirational labor that Black women like Aina engage in online. Black feminist thought emerged from Black women’s subordination at the intersections of race, gender, and class and has always been concerned with Black women’s labor and conditions under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks 2015, 4). Black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins have argued that Black women have always been working (2000), and the Combahee River Collective openly critiqued Marxist theory for failing to account for Black women’s domestic labor (1977). Black cyberfeminism applies the contributions of Black feminists to the digital realm and approaches Black digital culture, labor, and resistance from an intersectional feminist and cyberfeminist framework. According to Cottom and Gregory, Black cyberfeminism interrogates “how social relations of dominance are translated through digitally mediated relationships with technology, the interests that produce it, and the processes that resist them” (2017, 217). Black cyberfeminism provides the foundation to explore relationships between gender, race, and technology—specifically, how marginalized communities use digital technologies (Gray 2017, 359). 

Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) and Textual Analysis
 

Widening the scope of Black cyberfeminist critique illuminates how race and gender impact Black women’s digital feminized and aspirational labor. André Brock explains that CTDA enables technologies to be viewed as “an assemblage of artifacts, practices, and cultural beliefs” and asserts that technology and culture mutually inform each other (2016, 3). CTDA incorporates critical theoretical interventions—namely, critical race theory, feminist theory, and queer theory—to understand how folks with multiple marginalized identities use technology and engage with the digital. CTDA is primarily helpful for studying discourse: how technology culturally and discursively shapes identities in digital interactions as well as how non-white cis-het users engage in discourse online and discuss their experiences navigating digital spaces. In digital race and gender studies, scholarship, Black cyberfeminism, and CTDA are not just methodologies, they are also a means of understanding the nuances of identities and lived experiences in digital spaces. Together, Black cyberfeminism and CTDA center Black women’s lived experiences as invaluable knowledge, taking into account the many ways Black women navigate digital spaces. These frameworks can provide guiding principles for analysis and offer an entry point into discourses of digital labor and community from Black women creators themselves and ways that technology and culture are intertwined. 

Using CTDA and textual analysis, I analyzed eighty of Aina’s YouTube videos uploaded to her channel from 2018 to 2021. Each video was between ten and forty minutes in length. I analyzed each video’s audio transcripts as well as the visual content. I also incorporated viewer comments from each video into my analysis, noting pinned comments (comments that a creator has placed at the top of the comment section as a form of comment moderation and/or as a means of engaging with comments they like the most), as well as comments with the most likes. Analyzing top comments illuminates how platform norms and affordances shape discourse on YouTube. The comment section is also the place where direct communication and discourse occur, which allowed me to see how audiences were reacting to and engaging with Aina’s content and how Aina was responding. To further consider how Aina talks about the labor she performs, I supplemented my analysis with popular press interviews in which Aina discusses her identities and her work, which have often been framed as aspirational. These methods center Aina’s experiences in her own words and then situate them within a larger sociotechnical context of platform visibility, vulnerabilities, and harassment to explore the labor of Black digital content creators and address how Black women’s online and offline experiences are mutually shaped by racism and sexism (Brock et al. 2010, 1046). In addition to the kinds of labor associated with digital content creation, I have identified four additional forms of racialized and aspirational/feminized labor that Aina engages in: (1) navigating online harassment, (2) forming and protecting her digital community, (3) creating content while combatting stereotypes, and (4) centering her personal experiences and speaking out about misogynoir. 

Navigating Online Harassment  

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In an interview with InStyle magazine, Aina breaks down the many roles she performs, from accountant, lawyer, producer, social media manager, and even “lighting tech” (Farr 2021). As a digital content creator, Aina engages in multiple forms of labor, generally consisting of scripting, creating, editing, and publishing content, negotiating brand deals and partnerships, managing her social media presence, building online and offline relationships, and maintaining her branded image (for both her personal brand and her businesses). In addition, Aina’s tenure on the platform has given her a wide breadth of working knowledge about YouTube’s platform and algorithmic functions. 

There is a tension between being hypervisible and being rendered invisible by online platforms. Aina has openly critiqued algorithmic suppression on her channel, even creating a video dedicated to “Fix[ing] Your Social Media Algorithm” (2020b). She laments that despite a large online following, “I still have to promote and give ways on how to find my content. You know, it’s real out here in these streets” (2020c). Aina recognizes the impact of algorithmic bias, admitting that even her high subscriber count does not make her immune to shadowbanning (having her content hidden or restricted without notification). After being adopted by Google in 2006, YouTube’s algorithm was bolstered by Google’s search engine technology. Search engines reinforce racist biases, privilege certain search terms, and work to promote advertisements and sponsored content to users—and YouTube is no exception (van Dijck 2013; Noble 2018). YouTube’s videos are now ranked by popularity and engagement, which inform the algorithm’s presentation of content that the assumed audience wants to see (Bivens and Haimson 2016; Noble 2018; van Dijck 2013, 125). The videos that appear on the homepage and are recommended to users can be attributed to the platform’s algorithms pushing specific content to the top of users’ feeds. 
For Black women, the stakes are much higher in the fight against algorithmic suppression. While “like, comment, subscribe!” has become a mantra recited by creators to increase engagement and algorithmic visibility, more recently there has been a push to encourage users to also enable notifications because YouTube’s algorithm has been known to hide new uploads from users’ feeds. At the end of every video, Aina directly addresses her audience with an open invitation to “join the Jackie Aina Family.”