{"id":29897,"date":"2015-01-29T05:00:24","date_gmt":"2015-01-29T10:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29897"},"modified":"2015-01-29T07:41:07","modified_gmt":"2015-01-29T12:41:07","slug":"how-a-positive-welcoming-community-changed-for-the-worse-in-a-short-period-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/29\/how-a-positive-welcoming-community-changed-for-the-worse-in-a-short-period-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"How a positive, welcoming community changed for the worse in a short period of time"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Nation<\/em> last year, Michelle Goldberg<\/a> recounts the sad tale of a well-intentioned group of women whose message to the feminist online community blew up in their faces, becoming a focus for vitriol, hatred, and anger … from other feminists:<\/p>\n

The women involved with #Femfuture knew that many would contest at least some of their conclusions. They weren\u2019t prepared, though, for the wave of coruscating anger and contempt that greeted their work. Online, the Barnard group \u2014 nine of whom were women of color \u2014 was savaged as a cabal of white opportunists. People were upset that the meeting had excluded those who don\u2019t live in New York (Martin and Valenti had no travel budget). There was fury expressed on behalf of everyone \u2014 indigenous women, feminist mothers, veterans \u2014 whose concerns were not explicitly addressed. Some were outraged that tweets were quoted without the explicit permission of the tweeters. Others were incensed that a report about online feminism left out women who aren\u2019t online. \u201cWhere is the space in all of these #femfuture movements for people who don\u2019t have internet access?\u201d tweeted Mikki Kendall, a feminist writer who, months later, would come up with the influential hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen.<\/p>\n

Martin was floored. She\u2019s long believed that it\u2019s incumbent on feminists to be open to critique \u2014 but the response was so vitriolic, so full of bad faith and stubborn misinformation, that it felt like some sort of Maoist hazing. Kendall, for example, compared #Femfuture to Rebecca Latimer Felton, a viciously racist Southern suffragist who supported lynching because she said it protected white women from rape. \u201cIt was really hard to engage in processing real critique because so much of it was couched in an absolute disavowal of my intentions and my person,\u201d Martin says.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Just a few years ago, the feminist blogosphere seemed an insouciant, freewheeling place, revivifying women\u2019s liberation for a new generation. \u201cIt felt like there was fun and possibility\u2026a momentum or excitement that was building,\u201d says Anna Holmes, who founded Jezebel<\/em>, Gawker Media\u2019s influential women\u2019s website, in 2007. In 2011, critic Emily Nussbaum celebrated the feminist blogosphere in New York<\/em> magazine: \u201cFreed from the boundaries of print, writers could blur the lines between formal and casual writing; between a call to arms, a confession, and a stand-up routine \u2014 and this new looseness of form in turn emboldened readers to join in, to take risks in the safety of the shared spotlight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Internet also became a crucial place for feminist organizing. When the breast cancer organization Komen for the Cure decided to defund Planned Parenthood in 2012, the overwhelming online backlash led to a reversal of the policy and the departure of the executive who had pushed it. Last year, Women, Action & the Media and the Everyday Sexism Project spearheaded a successful online campaign to get Facebook to ban pro-rape content.<\/p>\n

Yet even as online feminism has proved itself a real force for change, many of the most avid digital feminists will tell you that it\u2019s become toxic. Indeed, there\u2019s a nascent genre of essays by people who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in it \u2014 not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists. On January 3, for example, Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican trans woman working on a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote<\/a> about how often she hesitates to publish articles or blog posts out of fear of inadvertently stepping on an ideological land mine and bringing down the wrath of the online enforcers. \u201cI fear being cast suddenly as one of the \u2018bad guys\u2019 for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time of publication,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Further, as Cross says, \u201cthis goes to the heart of the efficacy of radical movements.\u201d After all, this is hardly the first time that feminism \u2014 to say nothing of other left-wing movements \u2014 has been racked by furious contentions over ideological purity. Many second-wave feminist groups tore themselves apart by denouncing and ostracizing members who demonstrated too much ambition or presumed to act as leaders. As the radical second-waver Ti-Grace Atkinson famously put it: \u201cSisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly sisters.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Jim Geraghty for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Nation last year, Michelle Goldberg recounts the sad tale of a well-intentioned group of women whose message to the feminist online community blew up in their faces, becoming a focus for vitriol, hatred, and anger … from other feminists: The women involved with #Femfuture knew that many would contest at least some of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[828,987,58,351,997],"class_list":["post-29897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-bullying","tag-feminism","tag-internet","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-socialjustice"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Md","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29897"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29976,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29897\/revisions\/29976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}