Shelf Life: Feminism 2.0

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Before dedicating several hundred words to addressing Crittenden’s many ill-informed arguments, one of the site’s bloggers, Zeynab, took down the title. “For god’s sake,” she wrote, “would somebody check the Associated Press guidelines?! ‘Islamic’ describes architecture and history . . . things. A ‘Muslim’ is an adherent of Islam; Muslims are people, not things.”

Around and Around They Go

Do these bloggers know each other? Hate each other? Love each other? To some degree, I imagine, all of the above. They certainly seem to read each other, which keeps things lively, and there’s more interaction between them than I expected to find. Case in point: brownfemipower’s November post about teaching feminism drew in bloggers from Having Read the Fine Print . . . (guyaneseterror.blogspot.com), The Silence of Our Friends (the-silence-of-our-friends.blogspot.com), Hugo Schwyzer (www.hugoschwyzer.net), and others. It reads like a miniature anthology of perspectives on teaching feminism.

It’s easy to lose hours of your life to tracking the evolution of these conversations all over the Internet. Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog (finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com), an aggregator of frequently asked questions, is a good place to go when things start to get convoluted. The Carnival of Feminists (feministcarnival.blogspot.com) pops up twice a month, building networks by gathering “the finest feminist posts from around the blogosphere.” It has inspired several spin-offs, including the Carnival of Radical Feminists, Radical Women of Colour Carnival, the Carnival of Bent Attractions for GLBT communities, and others.

For now, the fact that feminist blogs are not part of a unified movement works in their favor; it doesn’t feel like you’re signing on to some all-encompassing agenda or reading canned opinions. The debate may be moving quickly—in real time, or close to it—but is it moving forward? I’m not sure that it is, but maybe that’s OK. It’s about time we stretched out, settled in, and really hashed this stuff out among ourselves.

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