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

Posted Without Comment

Jill

Because I think it’s valuable to let people speak for themselves.

A.

B.

C.

The crux, I think, of the issue:

People have been trying to say that they see racism and exclusion going on in terms of content and discussions at major feminists blogs. You can either choose to listen with an open heart or not. I think that, if we choose the latter, then we are only hurting ourselves.

17 thoughts on Posted Without Comment

  1. This kind of post makes me fucking mad. So basically YOUR opinion counts. God forbid she goes to the blog of Puerto Rican black woman to start the discussion.

  2. Wait, what? That’s why I posted the links — because the discussions are happening, people should be aware of them, and I’m linking so that people can go to those blogs and discuss it. That’s why I didn’t really write anything — because the conversations should be led by the people who have started them. I don’t want to ignore the fact that these conversations are going on, so I pointed them out. I don’t see the problem.

  5. For those us with complete and total brain cramps, when Liza says

    God forbid she goes to the blog of Puerto Rican black woman to start the discussion.

    Who’s the she and what’s the blog writted by a Puerto Rican black woman?

  7. Hi all. It’s a busy workday for me today and a sad day b/c we lost a blogger that we loved.

    I belong to Culture Kitchen though like LIza, I’m swamped and I’ve been part about contributing to her community. It’s all about comm. for me. Anyway, this is what I posted there, a version of it.

    Hey Liza,

    I interpreted Nubian (kortney) much differently.

    1. they have been building a Radical Women of Color Community.

    2. they started a Radical WoC Carnival

    3. As they gained more attention from the WoC Carnival, they found a lot of silence:

    –silence in terms of few people staying on the topic in the threads that were generated at big blogs, if they were generated at all.

    — lots of people visiting a blog, once a large feminist blogger lnked to it, but no one joining the conversation (I cut people a lot of slack for this. Studies show that only about 5% of internet users participate on email lists. The rest lurk. You can see just from looking at open sitemeter traffic that that’s a healthy percentage for a blog. Most, I’d say, get 2-3% of visitors discussing anything in comments. Piny, Jill, Zuzu, Lauren if they want could share what they guesstimate their percentage of regular posters in a week v. their traffic. I’ll guess it’s 1.5 – 2%. Part of that is coze we’re women with time constraints. Voila! STructural gender oppression in action.

    — in general, a lack of orientation to the issues that this particular group of radical women of color feel are important. (e.g., I devoted a lot of space to criticizing Ariel Levy’s book recently which, on a superficial look, does appear to be a very ‘white’ concern. Thus, my own blog, which while I don’t make it a big point of patting myself on the back about it, is what’s called “ally work.” without making it explicit how I saw my critiques of levy as connected to critiques of racism and classism and gender essentialism, then it was easily misinterpreted as white girl fluff.

    […]

    Big hugs. I hope we can all work this out. I think constructive criticism is great. Assertiveness is a great thing. Nothing like the *cringing* and tippy toeing around that people so often do to shut a conversation down. But I kind of worry that nubian, blogging with the assumption that only those already in the know were reading, just left out important context because, well, everyone knew what she was talking about, which really wasn’t about her writer’s desire to have her ego fed.

    Not at all.

    And yeah, I’m “speaking for” women of color. I trust them to kick me in the ass if I fucked up and shouldn’t have done this. I just hate to see a comment discussion break out without a little clarification of what I think is a misunderstanding.

    I respect and admire both nubian and Liza.

  9. Piny, Jill, Zuzu, Lauren if they want could share what they guesstimate their percentage of regular posters in a week v. their traffic. I’ll guess it’s 1.5 – 2%.

    Yeah, probably even less than that. To give an idea, we get about 40,000 hits a day, not counting the people who read through Bloglines and RSS feeds. How many people do you all think comment regularly? 30? 40? That’s less than 1%.

  11. I want to comment, but until I read what liza has to say in full content, i cannot and damn it all to hell if the link you gave me came up to nothing. I am not internet savvy in the least and don’t know if it means that her site is ‘down’ or whatever.

    I googled ‘culture kitchen’ and the links there came up empty as well. where is she? Am I missing something here?

  12. And btw, thanks for the link. Damn. I will definitely scan that essay. I’m kind of a dummy sometimes and figured it’s old news. D’oh!

    So, yeah, that confirms my suspicion about traffic v. percentage of commenters. I personally find it fascinating, coz I am in the business in a roundabout way.

    I’ll bet if we poke around, someone’s done or is doing a study about the gender-based time differences that make for differences in participation rates between men and women at blogs — though admittedly difficult. Heck, it only appears that I’m a woman, huh?

    My son says he’s going to win me millions some day. Then it will be time for the Bitch Think Tank for the study of every question I ever have about this stuff! LOL

  13. –silence in terms of few people staying on the topic in the threads that were generated at big blogs, if they were generated at all.

    — lots of people visiting a blog, once a large feminist blogger lnked to it, but no one joining the conversation (I cut people a lot of slack for this. Studies show that only about 5% of internet users participate on email lists. The rest lurk. You can see just from looking at open sitemeter traffic that that’s a healthy percentage for a blog. Most, I’d say, get 2-3% of visitors discussing anything in comments. Piny, Jill, Zuzu, Lauren if they want could share what they guesstimate their percentage of regular posters in a week v. their traffic. I’ll guess it’s 1.5 – 2%. Part of that is coze we’re women with time constraints. Voila! STructural gender oppression in action.

    — in general, a lack of orientation to the issues that this particular group of radical women of color feel are important. (e.g., I devoted a lot of space to criticizing Ariel Levy’s book recently which, on a superficial look, does appear to be a very ‘white’ concern. Thus, my own blog, which while I don’t make it a big point of patting myself on the back about it, is what’s called “ally work.” without making it explicit how I saw my critiques of levy as connected to critiques of racism and classism and gender essentialism, then it was easily misinterpreted as white girl fluff.

    Right. Cherry-picking and a lot of extremely short-term interest where interest exists at all. I also read comments on a tendency to wrench a post out of its real context–i.e. threats of sexualized violence on the blogs of African women of color–to use part of the gist to support some other point–violence against women (ahem) unmodified. And nubian commented on the tendency of white bloggers to make their presence known only when she discussed their behavior.

    What I’ve been wondering is what structural changes can be made in the link process to get people to stick around, virtually and conversationally. As it stands, apparently, either we mine for our own purposes or we ignore in favor of our own issues. Is there any way to encourage the habit of engaging?

  14. I just thought of something.

    Is there some way for different blogs to host the same comment page?

    For example…. You write an interesting post, nubian likes it, she posts it in its entirety at her blog, and the comments from each blog go to the same page?

    Think of each post as a plugin of sorts. The post exists in itself outside of any blog that displays it. Any number of blogs could host it and all comments from all blgos would appear together.

    Is the technology available/simple to do that?

  15. 2nd kate. The link to liza doesn’t give me anything, so I feel like I’m missing about half of this conversation.

  16. The link in comment #4 doesn’t go anywhere.

    I think they make valid points. I admit to not knowing the whole story since I’ve skimmed their posts (due to a lack of blog-reading time tonight but tomorrow will read more of them).

    But one comment I read was that a black blogger makes a post which gets linked by a white blogger and the comments end up on the white bloggers site instead of the black blogger’s site. This happens, and I’m sure that race affects it. However, I think it has more to do with people being comfortable commenting on the blogs they’re used to reading. I’ve been linked here a few times (thank you, Lauren!) and I’ve also been linked on Alas a Blog but received no comments from readers of this site or that site even though comments were made here and there about the post I wrote.

    And now is when I’ll guiltily admit to rarely making comments. Why? Unless I have the time to go back reread the comment thread and keep up with it, I fear that I might start a conversation and then abandon it due to being busy and leave others in the lurch. I may be the rare one but I think I may not be.

  17. The link in comment #4 doesn’t go anywhere.

    It did when I posted it, I swear! I think she may have taken the entry down.

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