Shelf Life: Feminism 2.0

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This chorus of voices chiming in to state the obvious can grow tiresome, but on the other hand, these sorts of items often drum up the most discussion and draw more readers to the blogs. (And in the case of the underwear, Wal-Mart wound up pulling the product the day after Feministing posted about it.)

Jessica Valenti, executive editor of Feministing, says she’d like to see some of the “less trendy issues,” like poverty and international concerns, get more space in the feminist blogosphere. “But what happens with us is we put that stuff up and no one comments,” she says. “You put up a blog on abortion, and people do.”

Now Included: Nonwhite Perspectives

Most young people will have their first experiences with feminism online, and when they do, it won’t be difficult for them to find those perspectives that are often overlooked in the women’s studies classroom: those of people of color, people with disabilities, people who are not heterosexual.

Reading the magnificent La Chola Blog (www.brownfemipower.com) is as close as I’ve gotten to those first stirring, revelatory moments as a fledgling feminist. (And judging by how much discussion the posts kick up on other blogs, I’m not the only one.) The site’s administrator, an English graduate student working under the moniker brownfemipower, is particularly skilled at writing long, frank, personal items whose length is born not out of self-indulgence, but out of the gradual, genuine unfolding of her thoughts.

In a November 21 post about teaching feminism, she criticized the racial focus of her women’s studies classes. “We’ve got a lot we have to work through, we have a lot we have to be accountable to each other for,” she wrote. “But we can’t start working through this shit as long as women’s studies departments continue to passive aggressively eliminate the histories of women of color interacting with white women and vice versa. Women of color need those histories to connect them to communities that have long been under assault. White women need those histories to understand The Tone Of Voice they find so aggravating in women of color.” (If you’re thinking to yourself, “But wait, I read some bell hooks in college,” you should read this post and its accompanying discussion.)

Muslimah Media Watch (muslimahmediawatch.blogspot.com) critically examines the ways in which Muslim women are portrayed in the media, catching inaccuracies and biases in coverage and policing the embarrassingly frequent misuse of vocabulary. In a December 11 post, Muslimah Media Watch blasted Huffington Post blogger Danielle Crittenden, who wrote about her experiment in “taking on the veil” in a series of blogs called “Islamic Like Me.”

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