First, let me say I'm not condemning the project. On the contrary, I think something like this is long overdue. Like a lot of online communities, online feminism is vast, often disorganized. and dependent on its anointed leaders to give it a "face." The problem is the face of the feminist blog world is often a young, educated, middle-class, white one. Contemporary feminism has a long history of excluding women of color, poor and working-class women, queer and trans women, older women, and women with disabilities. Online feminism is no different. To Martin and Valenti's credit, the participants in the project come from a fairly diverse spectrum of the feminist and social justice blogosphere, but there are still plenty of women who are going to feel excluded.
I like what Melissa said about networking while being isolated. A lot as been made of the report being very U.S. centric, which it is, but even within the US, if you're not from a large, metropolitan area, preferably on the east coast, it's easy to get lost, especially when you have few real life resources:
"There is a thing that happens in lots of progressive organizing, whereby privileged members of a group located in a major media center universalize their needs and experiences, presuming that someone in another part of the country (or other countries) needs and experiences the same things—and if only they get what they need, they can pass it along. But trickle-down feminism [H/T Tressie] doesn't work, for precisely the reason that the external presumptions about a universal feminism, even among privileged members of the group, don't work. Because other shit matters, too, like whether you live in Brooklyn or next to an endless soybean field."The myth of universality is something else that goes unaddressed. Feminists not part of the academic world, feminist workers, feminist union leaders are basically ignored by the big feminist sites, as are older women. I feel as though I'm part of a generation of women who was "born into feminism," so to speak, but not necessarily wanted by it. And I know that apathy is starting to show in my writing.
Flavia also wrote about "inhabiting a non-space" in FemFuture's analysis of the feminist blog world, which is especially problematic for non-native English speakers:
"And here’s what happens when you inhabit these cracks: you pretty much don’t exist. Years ago when I started writing publicly, I made the decision to write in English (instead of Spanish or Dutch) because a) it’s the language most spoken in my surrounding and b) my written Dutch is appalling. I lack nuance, I lack depth, I have the vocabulary of a child and quite frankly, it’s a language that limits my ability to communicate on the level I wanted to."This applies not only to women whose first language isn't English in a largely US-centric community, but to those lacking the vocabulary of academia. My feminism has come piecemeal and informally. I don't have an academic background in it; I've never taken a women's' or gender studies class. I'm well read, but I know I can be easily discounted, and my words can be marked as unsophisticated. It makes me not want to participate.
I'm glad to see a lot of these criticisms coming to light, but for those of us on feminism's margins, it's nothing that hasn't been said already.
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