Shelf Life: Feminism 2.0 - From patriarchy to pop culture, the blogosphere has it covered

[BridgeTheGap]

For a long time, I was pretty sure that feminism was too shrill, too uncool, too irrelevant to bother with. Power. Patriarchy. Equality. All that would have to wait until college, when I was assigned books and articles on the subject.

That was just seven or so years ago, but inroads to feminist thought are already much more accessible. Magazines like Bitch and Bust have built young, loyal reader bases by tying feminism to popular culture. (If girls are interested in America’s Next Top Model, don’t disregard it—engage it.) More recently, the blogosphere, that sanctum of nonacademic discussions on all conceivable subjects, has created a wide-open forum. What better medium could feminists hope for?

After logging some serious lurk time on 40 blogs and paying shorter visits to about another 50, I found that there’s no monolithic feminist screed out there, nor any sort of united agenda. This is a huge part of feminism’s appeal online: Thousands of people are maintaining their own minifeminisms, writing about whatever they deem important. Some think that reproductive health is the day’s most crucial issue. Others write about pop culture, or parenting, or sexual violence, or science fiction. Moving from one voice, one subject, one discussion to another, it’s clear that today’s feminism is about everything. And it’s this appeal to the mainstream, this proliferation of different perspectives and dissenting opinions that has the potential to make the f-word acceptable again.

http://tinyurl.com/25htas

[ismnotwasm]

1. Good point

I have an article in one of my Hypatia journals that always stays with me as a cautionary tale. I revisited it often

It's written by a Native American women---an Academic. She talks about her distrust and anger about modern feminism and the journey it took to accept it as a valid, healthy philosophy for women. Why? At first, in her mind, what happened to her people went way beyond patriarchy, sexism or misogyny. Her particular band and culture didn't HAVE patriarchy, and she saw white subjugation equally damaging to females and males. She also speaks of her experience in acadamia as a Native American woman.

Among other things, it WAS the word. "Feminist"


This is from the article

"Our experiences are so dissimilar that it makes no sense to identify strategies and methods for combating patriarchy when the majority of them have excluded Aboriginal women. Without our stories however, white women can continue to theorize some mythical standard of oppression of survival for all women. Let's face it; while some advances have occurred for women though the past few decades, white women have benefited most.

This power inbalance affects every part of the Aboriginal women's experience. Whether feminist or not, we continually struggle against oppressive stereotypes while simultaneously trying to deconstruct them. LaRocque also noted the difficulty we face in university settings. "Those of us who are decolonized and/or feminist have been accused of "speaking in our own 'voices'. which is taken as been biased, or doing something less that substantive or 'pure' research. Mihesuah notes how Aboriginal feminist are often considered less knowledgeable about their culture than Aboriginal women who reject feminism out of hand. When such critiques come from without the Western canon, they have a tendency to silence critique or comment, thus upholding patriarchal dominance;however, they can also reinforce the Native scholar's will to fight back and willingness to take on a feminist ideology.

For many, fighting back means telling our truth from our experience. Unfortunately, as LaRocque makes clear, telling personal stories is not seen as academic, which means that the Aboriginal woman's intelligence is either minimized or dismissed entirely. Such reduction or dismissal can lead not only to academic ostracizing for outsiders, but also to ostracizing from within our communities, whether that community is at home or in the academy


The article is long, and very eye opening. Kicked my ass, and humbled me.

So many of the blogs are "telling truth from experience", and they provide a feminist voice for those who haven't been able to fit in the "mainstream" (not that feminism is mainstream---Yet)