(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 and you can read part two here.)
Oh yeah. It’s time to talk about race some more. Ready?
Is Feministe one of the White Feminist Elite blogs? Where do we see Feministe sitting along the racial fault lines that fracture the blogosphere, or in the division between “big elite” and “small individual” blogs?
Jill: Over years of feminist blogging and decades of feminist activism before that, a lot of lines in the sand have been drawn, a lot of alliances formed and re-formed, a lot of mis-steps and healed wounds and old scars split open again. There are “sides,” but there are more than two of them. Women of color in the blogosphere aren’t a monolith. White women in the blogosphere aren’t a monolith, and hardly all qualify as “elite.” A lot of the bigger group blogs include writers with a variety of identities, and don’t fall quite so easily into one category or another (is Feministe an elite white woman’s blog because I’m here? If so, doesn’t that totally erase the contributions of all of our other writers who don’t fit into that mold quite so easily?).
There have been very problematic patterns of behavior that need to be addressed; there have been repeated instances of racism, silencing and co-opting. Those problematic behaviors are often racialized. A lot of the “sides” do fall along racial lines, largely because white women (myself included) seem to have an enormous propensity for fucking up. But lumping all women of color bloggers into one group to use as a tool to go after “elite white feminists” — or really, to go after one particular white feminist, while grouping in all other white writers to make it seem like a structural critique instead of a personal attack — is not bridge-building or conscientious anti-racist activism.
Cara: Exactly. Was I a part of the White Feminist Elite before joining Feministe, because I am white? And if not, where did I, and all of the other white feminist bloggers who don’t necessarily have a large platform — or who hardly feel “elite” and may also sometimes feel left out of feminist conversation due to other sites of oppression like income level, sexual orientation, gender identity and so on — fit in? And just as importantly, where does someone like Holly fit in? She’s a woman of color, but writes for a blog that has seemingly been dubbed elite, and seemingly also dubbed (obviously inaccurately) white. As previously covered, we are indeed white majority, but to just say “white” without qualification is ridiculously problematic. As Jill said, this incredibly simple and inaccurate binary erases the experiences (both positive and negative) and rightful places of many writers within the feminist or feminist-related blogosphere. And while there are certainly all kinds of issues that come into play across many lines, pretending that there’s just one line is incredibly unhelpful and doesn’t let us get at the many real problems that do exist.
Returning to some of the other points with regards to guest-blogging and “tokenism,” I think that, as Holly explained better in the first post of this series, there is significant and sincere difference between attempting to elevate certain voices because they’re interesting, we like what they have to say, and we want to offer them a bigger platform on which to say it, and attempting to elevate a voice to give yourself more street cred. Mandy and Brittany’s post clearly came down on the side of guest-blogging on major feminist blogs being the latter. I can sincerely say that if I felt like guest blogging on major feminist blogs was being done for street cred, I would want absolutely no part in it.
I know that as a white woman, I wasn’t the kind of guest-blogger being referred to, but when I was first asked to be a two-week guest on Feministe, I in no way felt that I was being invited in order to fill up a roster. I felt that I was invited because the people already blogging here liked my writing and what I had to say. And I can say that since I’ve been on board to witness it, that same tone, courtesy and respect was extended to every single guest we’ve invited. If one of our guests has ever felt that we did not extend that to them, I have never heard about it, and would be both surprised and deeply saddened to hear it. And I’d want to take immediate action to ensure that it never happens again.
That’s not to say that Feministe is perfect in any way. One area where I often feel that our guest-bloggers don’t get enough respect, and where I often do see attempts to stifle their voices, is in the comments. The hostility that our guest-bloggers can sometimes experience at startlingly different levels from what us regulars usually receive is something that we’re constantly discussing behind the scenes, and speaking out about both in comments and in separate posts on the blog. We want our community to feel safe and welcome not only for our guests on the back end, but also where most of you participate. It makes me sad and frankly scared that so many guests seem to be seen by some as intruding on the space, as if most of what they have to say isn’t usually what we already stand for. And yes, it does make me wonder if we’re accomplishing what we want to accomplish.
How to appropriately enforce community standards of respect and decency while continuing to let good faith disagreement and confrontation thrive is something that we are constantly working on, and is also sadly more of an art than a science. These experiences alone, but of course in actuality combined with many others, are reason enough to know that there are real and substantial problems within the blogosphere surrounding who is given a platform, and the way that some voices are indeed marginalized (or attempted to be marginalized).
Holly: Cara asks where I fit in, so I figured I would add a few thoughts on that. The short answer is “nowhere but the intersections.” That’s not the entirety of my identity, but it IS more or less a defining factor of my life experience. I think this is part of why I gravitate towards larger blogs that are not focused around a single identity, but a conflux of clashing ideas and overlapping truths. It’s messy. It results in bad conversations, like Cara says, and we need to figure out how to improve that. But I have never been able to take solace in the idea of building an entirely radical construct off in the wilderness with only kindred spirits, people like me. There aren’t really any other people like me. (Well, maybe except for my multiracial queer trans woc activist sister, whose voice is always gloriously and brilliantly different than mine too.) My radical politics have always been about carving out little niches to live in the thick of things, pockets of resistance, subversions of whatever we can scrabble together out of opportunities we get.
As for tokenism — just like Jack, I am under no illusions that I am here SOLELY because of my merits; that’s not even possible, even if every blogger here intended differently. It’s just how things work, structurally. The fact that I blog here is always going to be bound up with the fact that I represent something other than straight white non-trans feminism–in my own mind, in the perceptions of readers, all over the conversation. Regardless of what Jill or Cara or Lauren’s intentions are, we can’t just make that disappear. As we’ve seen, good intentions don’t necessarily count for much. At some level, when people from different walks of life, with different kinds of privilege and experience, come together to collaborate, there will always be some facets that look like tokenism. Those facets are exposed most harshly on the side of Feministe that faces the rest of the internet and the greater media environment. Feministe is probably seen by many passers-by as being a blog about feminism, where “feminism” is shorthand for the stereotypical and historically dominant form of the feminist politic: mostly white, mostly middle-class, almost entirely non-trans, mostly able-bodied, etc.
Like every other facet of our culture, there is a “generic default” that looks like a straight white able-bodied dude in his 20s or 30s. Feminism has struck away from that on gender, of course, but it still remains a generic monolith in too many other ways. Heck, we are creating more false monoliths with terms like “WOC/RWOC bloggers,” and the theoretically-opposed “WFE blogs,” and I hope that everyone who slings those terms (I do it too) is aware of what cardboard cutouts they are. It’s a human tendency to lump and split and lump, but one we should be vigilant about.
So yeah, I think Feministe is a fairly-white blog. That’s not just because the bloggers are 2/3 white, and it’s not because of the audience either; we have a LOT of amazing people of many different colors who comment here and turn this space into a community. But Feministe is positioned on a relatively busy thoroughfare of the internet. We get attention from the mainstream media sometimes, and links from all over. That means we get visitors from all over too. Plus, we are a “general interest” feminist blog that does not deal exclusively with issues of race, or ability, or queerness, etc. We’re spread out, our interests roaming, and that’s pushed more by the fact that there are six or eight of us, depending on who’s active and how you count heads.
All of that pushes us closer to the “generic center” of feminism, which remains culturally white despite our efforts. It will take a long time to change that, I think, and that’s why some WOC bloggers have abandoned the word and adopted other words for their projects, which center both race and feminism. I think Feministe is a ways off from being able to do that. Our subject matter is all over the place, and our comments section is too often a cesspool of racial defensiveness and hostility towards people who try to speak their truths about the insidious power structure of racism. But we are going to keep experimenting, getting it wrong, trying to make amends, trying to make it better, and I’m glad we have a cadre of good smart commenters to help us, because it really is about the community.
So what’s a woman of color to do, in a space that’s passing through the Milky Way of the blogosphere? Because of the whiteness inherent in the structure, some facet of our work will always be bound up in tokenism as well as representation. Even though tokenism can turn into revolution (thanks Kai) what are we revolting against here? Not the CIA, but a bunch of blogs. Instead, it is very tempting to focus energey on creating spaces that center women of color in ways that Feministe won’t ever really be able to, not in a sustained way.
Strategies around collaboration and separation is a discussion that women of color need to have amongst ourselves. There are many important conversations going on about that right now: how do we engage across race lines? Is that the real “melting pot” or “mixed salad” answer, or do we need alternatives too? I think we need a multiplicity of solutions, personally, but as I said in comments at My Ecdysis, I am someone who is almost tailor-made to be a marginal figure, half on the outside of any circumscribed space. A diplomat? A go-between? More like a marginal clown, but that’s a sacred duty too. So I pitch my tent here, even as I’m aware of all the complex differences that entangle and connect us.
Lauren: I’m of two minds on this one. I live a pretty average, white, Midwestern life full of reality TV and skin tags and fried food and cat hair and blogging is probably the only thing I’ve ever done that could be considered “elite,” so it’s really bizarre to me to talk about blogging in terms of prestige. Maybe I can explain how Feministe got to where it is and how that fits into where I think it is today, by explaining that a lot of this website’s past was focused on engaging the opposition in a way that was (mostly) friendly and in the spirit of autodidacticism and debate. In this website’s early days, I learned diplomacy by engaging MRAs and pro-life activists and libertarians and relating to them on a personal level even despite what I thought were gross, wrong-headed politics. I did develop e-friendships with many of them that went beyond trading barbs in the comments. It wasn’t so much about legitimizing their politics as much is was recognizing them as people with their own lived contexts and realities, as well as learning how to assert what I believe in and be aggressive in defending it.
I think the spirit of diplomacy has been an arm of the Feministe goal and community for some time, but as we’ve grown and gained a larger audience it’s been harder to maintain. Today I have less patience — I’m tired of Feminism 101, and tired of rehashing old ideas with new readers every time they pass through with a tired argument meant to curb my human rights. I also have less time to devote to creating new ways of developing and thinking of solutions to whatever communications problems are presented. Moreover, I learn more from lurking than I do from participating, and while I don’t want to insinuate that I find others’ hurt instructive, I do develop more from being exposed to others’ lived experiences than I do from spouting off about my own.
And maybe somewhere in this is where Feministe and the other “big” blogs are lacking. At a certain level of exposure you lose the ability to be open about your life in a way that is politically meaningful because you are exposed to judgment and critique in ways that are paralyzing. Every time I find myself tempted to write about my own experiences with sexual and emotional trauma, for example, or something lighter about my marriage or parental status, that are relevant to an overarching discussion about feminism, I stop. If I post about it at all, it goes on my personal blog. I mostly won’t write about it at all. All of which is to say that sometimes I miss the “smallness” of being able to write about whatever it is that suits me without feeling exposed and unsafe, both personally and professionally. And I believe part of this is what removes the “elite” blogs from the more personal conversations.