(This is the second part of our series of reflections on Feministe and its place in the bewildering and sometimes nauseating constellation known as “the feminist blogosophere.” You can read part one here.)
This time, your hostesses start to scratch the surface of meritocracy and the lack thereof, the social economies that create “large” and “small” blogs, the connections that create those economies, and a continuation of responses to What if the feminist blogosphere is a form of digital colonialism?
Is blogging a meritocracy? Could it be? What do we do to keep hierarchies of oppression from relentlessly structuring who gets heard and who doesn’t?
Holly: A lot of discussion in the last year about inequities in the blogosphere have started by focusing on the flow of money. It’s not a bad starting point, since following the money trail often leads you to power. The thing is, in this corner of the blogosphere, and often in feminist publishing in general, looking at the actual paychecks makes you realize we’re arguing over the crumbs of the patriarchy. And many WOC bloggers have pointed out over and over that suggesting their anger over white-dominated discourse is all about getting some money in their pocket is pretty insulting.
If you’ve been following these conversations about inequities in the feminist blogosphere, you’ve probably read at least a few comments by now pointing out that the issue of money is somewhat of a red herring. Blogging is barely even a minimum wage job most of the time at the top end of the spectrum. A whole bunch of smart people, including Kai and apostate (in comments on this post) have noted that we should be looking at status, social pull, popularity, and who gets a lot of attention from other blogs, from commenters, and from the lurking 90% of the audience that only reads and never comments.
It’s been my attitude for a while that audience attention is a form of wealth, and wealth should be shared. Like I said almost a year ago in a paragraph that got quoted more than I expected: “When any of us have a soapbox, an opportunity to get up and talk, we must continue to stand by those who aren’t called on.” You know, that’s not even that good of a quote — I should have said “and call on them ourselves when we have a chance to do so.” That’s why I’m glad that we’ve been trying to do more guest-blogging and more regular link round-ups. And why I am pretty perplexed at the idea that pointing towards other people’s work is exploitative.
There are some problems with applying a pure economic analysis to social economies. One simple examples: profit doesn’t often flow two ways equally, and usually you can look towards the side of greater power and watch all the money rushing “downhill” in that direction. Social esteem and communication can round-trip much more easily, sometimes automatically. That’s part of what’s wonderful about making friends, or kissing: goes both ways. (Fans of capitalism like to fantasize that economic relations work this way too, but it’s often just wishful propaganda.) Blogs are full of examples: Links and trackbacks. Quotations on one side, the full article on another site. A guest post, and discovering an entire blog. Multiple conversations, informing and feeding each other from many nodes in a network. A lot has been written about social networks and the development of online communities and communication tools. If you don’t get this stuff, it is hard to write a coherent critique of what’s happening; anyone who wants to do a power analysis of an environment as technologically mediated and rapidly evolving as the internet had better have a very firm grasp of the technology and the changing ways people are using it.
Jill: One thing that Mandy and Brittany got right is that blogging is not a meritocracy. Feministe gets a lot of traffic not because we’re the best feminist writers on the internet — although I do think my co-bloggers are quite good — but because we’ve been around for a long time, we’re on some big-name blog rolls, and there are enough of us to provide a steady stream of content. We work hard. I like to think we do a pretty good job most of the time. But so do a lot of other bloggers who don’t get millions of hits every single day — so there’s a lot more going on here than just hard work or talent.
Part of dismantling online hierarchies that reflect “real-life” ones, and part of mitigating that unearned blog-privilege, is ethical blogging practices and platform-sharing. We happen to have a large-ish platform, and we have ongoing conversations (usually over email and not in smokey back rooms, but maybe we’ll arrange more appropriate quarters next time) about how we can use our platform responsibly. Responsible blogging requires linking ethically, giving credit when someone else’s post sparked an idea or influenced you, and noting where you found information. For us, it’s also meant getting more voices on Feministe in a way that will drive readers to other great feminist websites. Linking is a good start, and our history of inviting guest-bloggers on was a continuation of that ideal. My own guest-blogging and writing stints on other sites have helped to bring new readers to Feministe. I never felt that I was being “tokenized” or colonized by writing for the Huffington Post or the Guardian, and I doubt anyone would suggest that was the situation — probably because it’s just assumed that I have the ability to make my own decisions about where I contribute and share my work, and that I’m not being hoodwinked by The Man when I write for larger publications.
So it struck me as offensive and frankly bizarre that Mandy and Brittany would dedicate so much time in their post to attacking guest-blogging practices — and that while trumpeting their disgust with “tokenism,” they would use WOC bloggers to go after big feminist blogs, the real targets (“wolves in sheep’s clothing,” to use their term). A lot of women of color and feminist and pro-feminist bloggers of color have been writing about hierarchy, racism and privilege in the blogosphere for years now, but I didn’t see links to the posts that surely influenced and shaped the now very highly-trafficked one at Professor What If. I did see weirdly academic footnotes, criticism of Western feminist bloggers for posting and moderating comments during their waking hours, and irritation when other bloggers wrote about the post in their own spaces — all of which makes me think that Mandy and Brittany don’t spend much time engaging with the blogosphere, or don’t understand the ethical codes that have evolved out of years of writing and sharing information online.
In their apology (which seems to have been written by Mandy, even though it’s signed by both writers), she explains that “not linking the URLs before the post went up was due to PWI’s lack of knowledge about how the Internet works, not mine,” which seems like a cop-out to me — not to mention throwing PWI under the bus — but that’s neither here nor there. The apology is constructive, to an extent, insofar as it’s at least a recognition that something went very awry with the original post. But many of the same problems persist — it’s posted at a URL called “digital colonialism,” first of all. And Mandy seems to be under the impression that she’s in a “double bind” — she tried to “stick up for WOC,” and now they’re mad. And to complicate things, it turns out that women of color have a whole lot of different opinions, and when there’s not one single consensus she’s not sure what to do. Ilyka covers this all pretty well.
Jack: I’ll keep it short – the whole bit in the original digital colonialism piece pissed me the fuck off. When I read this sentence, I nearly blew a gasket: “Many radical bloggers, both women of color and white women, have not been naïve enough to buy into these symbolic co-optation efforts, but some have.” Well shit, Nice White Ladies, thank you for telling me what’s what.
And as Jill writes above, their apology on this point didn’t really do it for me. I was not angry at Mandy and Brittany for “sticking up” for women of color; I was mad at them for SAYING RACIST PATERNALISTIC INSULTING BULLSHIT to and about women of color. Seriously, I’m not sure where the confusion lies there.
Lauren: The original post’s “objective” hyper-academic tone also grates, especially since Mandy at least is hardly objective. There’s public record of a spat between Mandy and her apparent object of interest, which makes me believe that the initial post isn’t about “big feminist bloggers” in general, but about one in particular. And while I have no desire to get involved in other people’s disputes, the fact that all “big feminist bloggers” were lumped together with no names named is suspect, considering the fact that this ongoing dispute clearly exists. For what it’s worth, it appears Brittney participated as a Feministing vlogger for some amount of time as well.
It’s kind of odd, then, to call for transparency. Including the information that both of them have some personal history with Feministing could have added to some credibility bolstering their argument (Was there a situation where their work was not recognized or credited, for example? Or did they feel “tokenized”?), but it makes sense in a piece partially about transparency to include it. Which adds on another layer to my anger about the piece: the duplicity. If there was good criticism to be made in the PWI post, it’s because it was other people’s criticism first. The rest appears to be a continuation of a personal argument.
Regardless, in this particular situation I’m still disappointed that the so-called “tokens” have been forced to take the weight of this insult largely on their own.
Cara: I think that we also deserve some of the responsibility for the fact that they have had to stand largely on their own. Because of the length of time that it has taken to formulate this response — due to a commitment to write collectively, which I think is important — we haven’t gotten out there at the speed that the blogosphere so often demands. I of course don’t think that our guests, and our non-guests who also insulted, need us to defend them; and as proven by the many links above, they have of course done a marvelous job of refuting the arguments on their own. I just wish that we had been able to stand in solidarity with them sooner, and it truly makes me sick that, as BFP has noted, an argument between white women has come down on the shoulders of women of color.