In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Project Guest-Blogger 2010

Jill

It’s that time of year again, when we invite some of our favorite bloggers, writers and activists to guest-post at Feministe. This year, we’ve invited about 30 people to participate. Each writer will blog for two weeks, about whatever they please. We have an amazing line-up, and we think you’ll all be really excited to see who’s posting over the next three months. We will let them introduce themselves, but trust us: It’s going to be a great summer.

But because guest-blogging also means that we have a whole bunch of new people camping out on Feministe grounds, we have come up with some ground rules and general guidelines to make sure that we maintain a thoughtful and productive comment section.

1. Please think of our guest-bloggers as invited guests who are staying over at our house, and think of yourself as a friendly neighbor dropping by. Show them the attendant respect. All of the permanent Feministe bloggers will have far less patience with rudeness to guest-bloggers than we have even to rudeness directed at us. Engaging with and even challenging the posts is always ok — just do it respectfully and in good faith. If you aren’t sure that your comment achieves that, please refrain from posting it.

2. Know that guest-bloggers are fully allowed to moderate their own comment sections. Some of them will have stricter moderation rules than others. Some of them will have looser rules. These rules will not always accord exactly with what you expect from the regular Feministe bloggers. Know that the Feministe comment policy still applies, but that each blogger will have a slightly different style and you may not like it. If you don’t like a particular blogger’s moderation style, we suggest reading their posts and just skipping over the comment sections.

3. Know that the guest-bloggers have a wide range of histories, backgrounds, viewpoints, politics and feminisms (and non-feminisms). Part of the point of the guest-blogger series is to introduce Feministe readers to different perspectives and new writers. Not all of the guest-bloggers are going to have views that accord exactly with what you’re used to seeing on Feministe. That’s a good thing! We can all learn and be challenged and hopefully move forward.

4. Know that the guest-bloggers have been given full reign to write about whatever they want. Some of them were selected precisely because they write about things other than feminism. Complaints that they are not covering what you think is important, or questions of “Why is this on a feminist blog?” can be answered right now: Because that’s what we, the Feministe team, wanted. We wanted a wide range of topics to be covered. We wanted to cover some topics that are not, at first glance, glaringly feminist. You are welcome to skip posts that don’t appeal to you. And you are welcome to blame the regular Feministe bloggers for the occasional non-feminist post! But do blame us, not our guests.

5. Be conscientious of what you may not know. The guest-bloggers, as stated above, come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Take care not to assume a writer’s gender, race, physical ability, religion, sexual orientation, location, citizenship status, nationality, history, etc.

6. Finally, have fun! Learn some new stuff. Add some new blogs to your RSS feed or google reader or blogroll. This is our favorite time of the year, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

-The Feministe Team

7 thoughts on Project Guest-Blogger 2010

  4. If s.e. smith on 6.7.2010 isn’t interested in anything Feministe readers might have to say, can s.e. smith please insert a cut, so no one has to read s.e. smith posts unless they want to? They might well eventually be interesting, even if the first one is all about how we won’t have anything interesting to say, but if comments are disabled, I’d appreciate a cut.

    1. Jesurgislac, if you don’t want to read the writers on this site — and if you’re not going to carefully read what is written and accuse them of saying things they don’t say, and explicitly stated they did not mean — can you please keep that to yourself? No one is forcing you to read anything. You can scroll, or you can not visit the site at all. The choice is yours, but we are not going to ask our invited guest to hide ou’s work because some people had their feelings hurt by ou’s decision to to do what ou felt ou needed to do to feel safe in this space! Especially when s.e. is using the same rules here as ou’s own space. And when we, the Feministe team, have decided that we don’t want the potential for bullying and silencing to allow certain bloggers we wanted to write here to be excluded, since that’s what such bullying actually aims to do.

      Can you also reread the post that you just commented on, which states that our guests are going to have different comment choices and we expect you to respect that? Thanks.

  5. Yeah, I did realise after I commented that the solution to not wanting to read smith’s posts is, well, not to read them. My eyes disfocus just fine to slide over posts like that.

    Can you also reread the post that you just commented on, which states that our guests are going to have different comment choices

    Specifically, what the post says is that guests will have different moderation policies, not that guests will be allowed to ban all comments from everyone altogether. Banning comments isn’t moderation, it’s refusal to moderate. If you intended to include comment banning under “moderation”, I do suggest to update to make that clear.

  6. Banning comments isn’t moderation, it’s refusal to moderate.

    And getting hung up on this to the extent that you want this post to clarify that no comments counts as an acceptable commenting policy is pedantically (and frankly kind of passive-aggressively) nitpicking semantics to further express your disapproval of the choice a blogger is making, as Cara already stated, in order to feel safe & comfortable guest-blogging here, which seems to me prioritizing your disapproval and/or annoyance with a choice that, I would assume, has a significantly bigger impact on s. e. smith than it does on you, over, again, the actual very much non-trivial reasons for ou’s decision.

    I mean, really: the scroll bar is over there; and while YES technically the sentence you excerpted states that guest-bloggers have their own moderation policies, not EXPLICITLY excluding the decision to turn comments off, the main thrust of this post is that you should respect the guest-bloggers and their decisions, whom the Feministe team has invited because they want to share with their readers what they have to say, including, for example, s. e. smith’s very legitimate reasons for turning comments off – which, incidentally, include wanting people to (unusually for blogging, this space included) digest more than react immediately as you are doing right now (because, really: it took you until after you posted your comment to recall the existence of the scroll bar? really?)

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