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

Selfless Signal-Boosting Wednesday

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These signal-boosting posts are a complement to our long-standing Shameless Self-Promotion Sundays, this thread is for recommending someone else‘s writings/events. Use this thread for ICYMI links and anything else you think other readers might find interesting.

Especially welcome are links to those who are blogging on issues Feministe has not recently addressed (the links can be to older posts, just something you’ve found recently relevant).  Please save the self-promotion links for this Sunday – use this thread to let Feministe readers know about the other blogs you love to read, and activist/celebration events you long to attend, especially from those on the margins of the mainstream social justice communities, who tend to not get as much exposure as they should.

Netiquette Guidelines:

  1. Effective signal boosting names the article author(s) and/or organising bodies.
  2. Include content notes/trigger warnings/NSFW alerts where needed as a courtesy to other readers.
  3. Keep this thread focussed on the linking – the idea is to make your comments on the other blogs being linked!  (seconding/thirding etc is fine, adding extra Content Notes for the benefit of other readers is a community service, linking further/related reading is always welcome, but keep it short and sweet)
  4. If you have Reasons to not leave a response on a recommended article, don’t just dump it on this thread  ~ analytical discussions about various links belong on the Open Thread or Spillover.

8 thoughts on Selfless Signal-Boosting Wednesday

  2. Yo Mama as a great blog.

    Here’s an excerpt from her latest:

    Let’s Talk About Fight Club

    In her deeply necessary book about helping boys grow into happy, healthy, productive, and honorable men, Masterminds and Wingmen, Rosalind Wiseman notes that despite the fantastic work that a slew of experts are doing on boys’ issues, “…the reality is that the impact of Boy World and boys’ social dynamics on boys’ emotional well-being has been left out of the national conversation.”

  4. Excellent post relevant to many recent discussions here: White feminists vs white feminism (Terese Jonsson at between the lines)

    Five years ago I wrote a post for The F-word aimed at white feminists like myself, calling for us to challenge racism and white privilege within feminist activist communities.
    […]
    In the last five years, feminist activism in Britain has changed significantly for the better […] at least two significant things have happened in the last five years. One was the formalisation of the Black Feminists group in 2010 and their central role in promoting an intersectional approach to feminist organising in Britain. Secondly – and on a more global level – the explosion of social media has significantly changed the ‘rules’ of public debate. Bypassing white feminist gatekeepers, feminists of colour have built significant independent platforms from which they have been able to more effectively and consistently challenge the dominance of white feminist discourse online (although while it can be a powerful tool for social justice, social media should not be mistaken as the great equaliser of public debate).

    Jonsson quotes several WOC feminist activists and academics who specifically address the distinction between “white feminism” (feminist politics which do not attend to race) and “white feminists” (feminists who are not People of Colour and who may or may not practise “white feminism”), which is a crucial distinction that has all to frequently been elided, mostly by people objecting to criticisms of “white feminism”. I recommend bookmarking this one.

    If we understand white feminism as a discourse supported by structures – and vice versa – it becomes clear that it is not going to be undone by individual white feminists renouncing it. In fact, white feminists who are committed to ending racism, would do well to not distance ourselves from white feminism but rather to understand how we are implicated within it – to draw on a recent blog post by Ahmed, to see our complicity as a starting point. What are the structures of white feminism and what is our (as individual white feminists) stake in them?

  7. Satifice, an author totally new to me, has a great post responding to Eli Pariser’s popular TED talk (based on his book) about the personal and political dangers of “filter bubbles” –

    As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

    The Filter Bubble Is a Misguided, Privileged Notion

    The first and most glaring problem with this idea is that it wholly makes this into a technological problem when it is a social problem.[…] From the moment we are born, we already exist in a filter bubble. A bubble that is determined by many factors outside of our control: race, gender, class, geography, etc.
    […]
    Second. Only the most privileged of people are truly able to exist within a filter bubble. […] Existing in the world as a maginalized person means that there is never a filter bubble. You don’t get protection like this.
    […]
    I have literally spent my entire life listening to, learning about, being exposed to ideas, thoughts, worldviews that make me uncomfortable and that I do not agree with.

    Instead of having to expend effort to find stuff that disagrees with me, I’m always on an eternal search for information that agrees with me.

    It was hard to pick out just these few quotes, but quoting more would mean people might think they don’t need to click through to read the rest, and I would hate for anyone to think that.

  8. Just boosting this excellent link posted by pheenobarbidoll in the latest Open Thread:

    This is a must read for all the white commenters here, who like to interject their thoughts when poc are talking about racism. Especially those in the last open thread who felt the pressing need to whitesplain the law. http://jaythenerdkid.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/we-all-have-opinions-heres-why-i-dont-care-about-yours/ read this. And further, believe it.

    Author is jaythenerdkid, aka Aaminah Khan, at Days Like Crazy Paving

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