the most discouraging and upsetting thing in wake of all this crap to me is how many people have said “who are those people?” (that is: black amazon, brownfemipower, flavia) and what happened?
i really hope people use the “opportunity” to interrogate why nobody seems to know about the history of women of color in the blogosphere, especially because so much of our history coincides with the history of white women. why do you know the history of white women, but don’t know the basic rudimentary relationship they had with their woman of color contemporaries? why don’t you know our history as it exists outside of the relationship with white supremacy? how often does this lack of knowledge/historical awareness happen throughout US feminism? from the beginning of the US in that damn senneca falls meeting?
sure, there’s been some minor roadblocks put in place, like many of us shutting our blogs down.
but…we’re all still *here*. and people like flavia and black amazon (and karnythia, so_treu, amaditalks, etc) haven’t stopped talking about hugo. you know who ALSO knows that we haven’t stopped talking? hugo. who wanted to “shut flavia the fuck up.” and who saw women of color as “being in the way.”
why was hugo so aware of our presence, but so many white feminists are just confused right now? (or “behind the curve”?)
I am trying to articulate some thoughts (for a separate post sometime soon probably) about something I’ve been cudgeling on (LOL you bet I’m using that one to define whatever I write about feminist theory from now on) all along: the ahistorical, context free, vacuum that is online white dominated feminism. Everything seems to happen NOW and only NOW. It’s like we do not exist as part of a historical continuum where “stuff” has been going on for decades or even centuries. I say centuries because online feminism is a continuation of feminism in the flesh. Our flesh. Our bodies. This ahistorical situation we have now is convenient and hegemonic because then it allows shit like this to happen regularly without the hegemony ever being challenged. Consumers of online feminism (YES, consumers, because this is a business pursuit for the feminist mass media) can apply the same mentality they apply to every other product: “who cares? I never heard about this before!”. It’s the same mentality a consumer applies to a review of soap or cat litter (who cares? I don’t use that soap anyway!). It is also a convenient narrative to push because then there is no need to have long term accountability. On the internet this feminist mass media is only accountable until the next outrage cycle takes over. The ahistorical vacuum facilitates these dynamics and, I’m going to say this again (as if I haven’t said it enough), it brings the page clicks.
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