Hello, Feministe-ers! I’m Sarah. I’ve guestblogged here before; you can find my stuff here.
This time around, well…I’ve sort of broken up with feminist blogging. I’ve taken Latoya Peterson’s advice and taken my feminism to another arena, which is mostly writing about the economy.
I still, as bell hooks framed it, advocate feminism. But I’ve been wondering lately if I am that invested in feminist as an identity. I tend to go for bigger terms—social justice, socialism, the left—that I hope obviously include feminism, but anyone who’s ever talked to more than a few leftist men knows that ain’t always the case.
Yet I find that the issues that get me up in the morning, that get me fired up and passionate, well, they’re about the ongoing class war that not just the U.S., but the world is fighting. Riots across the UK just now, revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, reverberating across the world.
The class war tends to hit women the hardest: we have less wealth, less income, less security than men worldwide. As Laurie Penny put it,
“Trickle-down feminism is as nonsensical a liberation strategy as trickle-down wealth redistribution. The problem with a glass ceiling is that nothing trickles down. While we all worry about the glass ceiling, there are millions of women standing in the basement — and the basement is flooding.”
The reverse, though, is also not true—simply fixing the economy, the power structures, doesn’t guarantee women (and people of color) their fair shake. So bringing my feminism, my racial justice lens, to writing about the economy means pointing out always who’s in that basement as it’s flooding. How the class war has fed off race and gender wars, how politicians who advocate legalizing same-sex marriage but cut programs for the poor hurt more poor queer people than they help.
But I do that for my day job—I’m an associate editor at AlterNet.org, where I cover politics, the economy, labor and occasionally media and pop culture as well. What am I going to do here that’s different?
While I don’t maintain much of a blog anymore—my Tumblr is equal parts pretty pictures and emotional musings—I do like the format for its openness, its space in which to tease out ideas. I like to write about pop stars and movies, look at the threads running through our culture, wonder what they say about us. You’ll probably get a few rants about the economy, and you’ll also probably get Robyn.
Other than that? I’m not sure. Hope you enjoy the ride, though.