Yesterday I saw many (a few dozen) reblogs of that quote from Latoya Peterson about the feminist blogosphere being oversaturated. To remind everyone (and I am sure most people have seen it by now):
Advice for young feminists? Do something else besides feminism. I’m serious. The feminist blogosphere is oversaturated in my opinion. Please, find something else you love and take feminist theory there. It gets lonely over here in tech and video games – I have a great crew of other feminists but we are a little island in a vast sea. We need more feminist minded business bloggers, feminist theory wielding finance bloggers. Labor organizers with a feminist lens blogging. Can you imagine what Deadspin (the sports blog) would look like with a feminist on staff? Restructure writes about science, tech and feminism – join her! Publish a blog doing literary criticism with a feminist lens! Take on the NYT! Talk about class issues and feminism. Whatever it is, apply your feminism in a different space.
Now, my fangirl attitude towards Latoya is pretty well known. Basically, I love her blogging and she is someone I always check out because even though she writes about/ from an American perspective, in turn, some of her pieces have triggered in me the application of certain filters (which are very different from those in North America) to the place where I live. So, for once, I was surprised to find myself emphatically disagreeing with her.
The feminist blogosphere is oversaturated, you say? Sure… it is oversaturated with monotones. With one mainstream perspective (which also happens to be mostly American, mostly cis, mostly white, mostly able bodied, mostly wealthy). The rest? Not so much. Some tiny voices struggling to get attention, to get noticed, to get their stories out there. So yes, we can agree there is an oversaturation of a certain kind of feminist blogging (which is not even the fault of these people, and part of a larger, more structural problem), but there is certainly not an oversaturation of all possible feminist/ womanist narratives and theory. As a matter of fact, there aren’t even enough of those.
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