Greetings, Gentle Readers!
The Feministe crew generously (and perhaps unwisely, given my penchant for incendiary rhetoric) invited me to pollute their front page for two weeks. I’m s.e. smith, and you may know me from this ain’t livin’, my personal website, or FWD/Forward, where I am a founding contributor. I am very honoured to be invited on as a guest here; one of my favourite features at Feministe is the summer guest blogging, where I get introduced to a lot of new and interesting voices, and it’s quite exciting to get to be one of them.
What Will I Be Writing About Here?
I’ll be writing about an assortment of things over the next couple weeks. Some things are going to be explicitly feminist in the traditional sense, like a piece asking why it is that on mixed-gender creative teams in television, the women are blamed for failures and the men are blamed for the successes.
Others are things that I think are feminist issues, but are not as widely covered on feminist sites. I’m interested in everything from environmental issues to prison reform, and I would be remiss if I didn’t take advantage of the Feministe platform to get some of you reading and thinking about these issues in the limited time I have. For some of you, I may be expanding perspectives. For others, I’ll be going over tired old ground. I hope that for all of you, it will at least be interesting!
How Come Comments Are Closed?
There’s a thing that happens in online spaces that gets particularly exacerbated with guest bloggers. People don’t do a lot of reading and thinking, and they do a lot of talking instead. People gloss over posts to get in with a comment without really processing or weighing the material. They shout over each other in comments. Soon, arguments erupt that have nothing to do with the original content of the post. And sometimes, communities can be quite harsh on guest bloggers. We are new voices, we are unfamiliar, we challenge people by bringing in discussions of issues that haven’t been centred or addressed before.
So, I’m turning comments off. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you or that I don’t think you have anything to say. It just means that I really want you to read, consider, weigh over, and think about what I have to write about. I want to force the conversation to slow down. I want to break out of the cycle of reactionary responses and break into the cycle of an actual discussion, which is why I want you to really listen (read).
I live at the intersections of a number of oppressions; I am disabled, I am a nonbinary trans person, I am queer, I am fat. Voices like mine tend to get drowned out and silenced a lot, which is why we carve out spaces of our own. Feministe has very kindly offered me a soapbox for two weeks, and I’m going to use it.
We shall see how things go. I may open up comments on my final post to give people an opportunity to talk about some of the things I bring up. These posts are not the last chapters in a book and the discussion didn’t begin, and won’t end, here at Feministe. Closing comments gives all of us a chance to take a step back, and I am very grateful to the Feministe crew for allowing me to do that.
Many thanks again to Feministe for hosting me. I’m really looking forward to my time here!