Truth and Objectivity. Crispin Wright - - Harvard University Press. Paul Horwich - - Clarendon Press. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays Richard Rorty - - University of Minnesota Press. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty - - Princeton University Press. Charles Peirce's Limit Concept of Truth. Catherine Legg - - Philosophy Compass 9 3 Political Corruption as Deformities of Truth.
On Truth. Harry G. Frankfurt - - Knopf. Steven Levine - - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 4 On Bullshit. Frankfurt - - Princeton University Press. Andrew Aberdein - - In G. Louis and all points in between. Blogs written by women of color from one side of the globe become topics of discussion on the other side in a matter of minutes.
Social media has made it possible for women of color to speak to each other across borders and boundaries. I would like to utilize the SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen hashtag and the subsequent aftermath to consider the perils and promise of Twitter, Tumblr, and other social media platforms for re forming mainstream American feminism.
By delving into the discourses generated by the key participants in SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen debate via their tweets, posts, and social media statements, I hope to reveal how this contemporary discussion tragically replicates the failures of previous feminist waves.
I will then consider how hashtag feminism implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — challenges the Digital Feminism articulated by Courtney Martin and Vanessa Valenti in the report entitled FemFuture: Online Revolution a. For it was the impassioned online discussions around FemFuture in April, that first revealed the long-standing fissures in the American feminist movement.
Finally, I will consider the growing white feminist backlash to WOC-led twitter campaigns. But before I go any further, it is important to historically situate these debates. These signs of a lived experience of difference from white female experience in the United States appear repeatedly throughout s U.
Such expressions imply the existence of at least one other category of gender, reflected in the very titles of books written by U. Despite the powerful protests and potent writings produced by feminists of color, racism was never successfully integrated into feminist theory and practice Sandoval , Solidarity is for white women when your very existence is considered a dividing force.
Admittedly, this is a not a new problem but one embedded in the foundations of American feminism. Some feminists, however, were troubled by the sweeping generalizations and false binaries the hashtag created Brittos , Gay , and Matthews Gay maintains that SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen encourages us to see all white feminists as racist and women of color as traitors to feminism Jill Filipovic, one of the digital feminists implicated in the Hugo Schwyzer debacle, penned a seemingly heartfelt apology Yet the response to it, particularly from white feminists, is largely performative.
This may not be performative feminism, but it is certainly perfunctory. In many ways, these hashtags are a direct indictment of the parochial vision of online feminism articulated in the FemFuture report.
White women used to simply and straightforwardly ignore difference. In their theorizing, they used to speak as if all women as women were the same. Now they recognize the problem of difference. Whether they recognize difference is another matter. There is a dangerous ignorance in assuming FemFuture is a first, a start, or new. In April , they posted this report online as a PDF. Critique of the report was instantaneous and relentless Arreola ; Dzodan b; Factora-Borchers in Mirk ; Luther ; McEwan ; Rawls a; Utilizing the FemFuture hashtag, bloggers, activists, educators, and organizers took the participants and the report to task for what appears to be U.
Further complicating matters, some of the participants represent digital spaces Feministe, Feministing that have proven historically hostile to women of color bloggers Johnson To Johnson, this is. If only because of this history, it should be. Johnson It seems that Valenti and Martin may be guilty of being lovingly, knowingly ignorant.
The production of the FemFuture report is emblematic of the white liberal feminist approach to its perceived exclusivity: symbolic multiculturalism. Native American activist and feminist scholar Andrea Smith recommends that mainstream feminism stop fixating on superficial inclusion and instead center its analysis and organizing practice on the marginalized. In part, this is because FemFuture recognizes difference but not the relational nature of those differences.
The failure to build a coalitional feminism, one that recognizes the relational and shifting nature of difference, is not just a failure of FemFuture but of feminism itself. But how does one build a feminist movement that is not built on female aggrandizement but rather on the liberation of all women? The coalitional and intersectional feminist subject does not, as some fear, spell the end of feminism. It signals the end of a certain conception of feminism, a neo liberal conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of womankind who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice Hayles , Surviving the neocolonial and globalizing conditions of late capitalism requires returning to the heyday of second wave feminism: the s.
It was during the s that U. It requires a coalitional subject, a feminist being mindful of intersections and contradictions, one willing to seek kinship with strangers. Does hashtag feminism bring such a subject into consciousness or further divide feminists?
That is the question that I will take up in the final section. I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since then it is no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. We have to shift from catharsis and reckoning to change.
We have serious problems to deal with. We have a painful, infuriating history to reconcile — one where the concerns of heterosexual, able middle-class white women have too often been privileged at the expense of everyone else. On December 3, , she co-created the hashtag FastTailedGirls with Hood Feminism Co-Founder Mikki Kendall to discuss the sexualization of black girls and the devastating consequences.
Within a few hours, the topic trended nationally on Twitter, men and women talked about how the label impacted them. The response was overwhelming and heartbreaking. Just as the tweets inspired by SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen revealed the historic nature of feminist divisions, NotYourAsianSidekick illuminated issues that Asian Americans have been battling for the past half century.
Matsuda is sadly correct. Ultimately, the challenge for contemporary activists is how to learn from past struggles and channel the passion of social media into something more lasting: a grassroots movement.
Park has since partnered with Asian American advocacy group 18 Million Rising to turn the hashtag into a sustainable movement.
Like white feminists in the first and second wave, Murphy and Wilde-Blavatsky universalize gender, minimize racism, and erase other vectors of difference that impact how patriarchy is experienced.
Goldberg is deeply critical of Kendall whom she characterizes as mean and obsessed, a bully feared by other feminists. For Goldberg, Kendall symbolizes the archetypical angry black woman, killing white feminist joy by daring to point out racism within feminist politics Ahmed Arreola Several feminist commentators suggest that the real issue is power not tone Daniels ; Kaba and Smith ; Kendzior ; Trudy a; Park and Leonard and that equating criticism of mainstream feminism with bullying effectively silences the voices of WOC, queer women, trans women, and poor women Crommunist ; Hopkins ; Trudy b.
Black women are portrayed as the bullies and never the bullied. As Saidiya Hartman and Jared Sexton have noted, black suffering is always made illegible. Like their feminist predecessors of color, hashtag feminists have found common ground and are beginning to build coalitions across profound cultural, racial, class, sex, gender, and power differences Sandoval , It will take place online and off.
And if feminists like Murphy, Wilde-Blavatsky, and Goldberg want a place in this brave new FemFuture, they will have to learn to see the potential of anger. For as Audre Lorde fittingly reminds us,. The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar.
This article has been openly peer reviewed at Ada Review. Susana Loza is an assistant professor of media culture at Hampshire College.
Her research and teaching interests encompass science fiction and horror; digital media and cybercolonialism; the politics of online fandom; and power, privilege and cultural appropriation.
I really appreciate this well-researched overview and the copious references. I know an article like this has to cut off somewhere, but do you have any insight on the role of 4chan trolling in these events? Dear Pat: I am afraid my focus was mainly on Twitter so I did not explore how 4chan or Reddit might amplify what some see as trolling or toxic behavior. I would be very interested in how different social media intersect and compound the issue.
Thanks for the reply — I was actually referring to twitter, to the 4chan members who made so many false feminist twitter accounts for the purpose of sowing discord among feminists on twitter. A long list of them has been collected under yourslipisshowing. After all, people began to complain about anti-white feminist hostility on twitter at just that time.
I see. Thanks for bringing that hashtag to my attention. Thanks for doing this important massively citational work of cataloging and conversing with this archive. Your email address will not be published. Share Article. Van Deven Is mainstream feminism destined to remain the terrain of white women? Jamie Nesbitt Golden testifies to the critical importance of social media to WOC feminist praxis: We share frustrations, triumphs and failures. In Methodology of the Oppressed , Chela Sandoval meticulously documents the emergence of what she calls US Third World Feminism: These signs of a lived experience of difference from white female experience in the United States appear repeatedly throughout s U.
To Johnson, this is emblematic of the larger problem with the gathering and mission of the project. You don't get ignore the problem in favor of problematizing people's reactions to it. That is textbook abusive behavior, and it is used by oppressive people of all agendas. All I've said is that the problem should be brought up in a constructive way and not a divisive way. Yes, I agree the division is already there, so why perpetuate it?
We should be bringing people together, not pushing them apart. How is it helpful to the feminist movement to draw a strict dividing line between black feminists and white feminists or poor feminists and rich feminists?
Feminism is about equality, it's not an elite club that only certain people get to be a part of. Embracing the differences between feminists within the movement is how the movement can get stronger, I don't see how getting angry at each other is helping. I'm saying the root of this whole issue is how people treat each other,. I get it. Fox News keeps trying to pretend it's , and Bitch is still wrestling with Of course there is no sisterhood here. I could have told you that when I was five.
However, all of these examples you give pertain not specifically to race but to class, the other great bugaboo that privileged feminists and American culture generally would like to pretend does not exist:. If you want to talk about ethnicity, then talk about ethnicity. If you want to talk about class, then acknowledge that you are talking about class. And please go read Ms. Kendall's post in Ebony, as she's got it all figured out that respectful dialogue is about hearing and being heard.
Regardless if you want to label yourself feminist, grand wizard, or insert-label-here, passive aggressive communication to rationalize abusive behavior is abuse, precisely the reason why the feminist label no longer works for me.
I am a young, white feminist from Australia. I certainly agree that mainstream feminism has a long history of silencing the voices of people who do not fall into the category of white, educated, middle class, cis-gendered and straight. I have recently come out as a lesbian and, seeking lgbt specific feminism, I've been introduced to the concept of privilege.
I am confronted with male privilege and straight privilege in day to day life and so it is important that I begin unpacking my own privilege - white, ablebodied, cis, middle class and urban.
Coming from a country with a colonial and racist history, I wish to be an ally to the indigenous population, as well as do what ever I can to undo social inequality and privilege within that context. Anyway, I found this paper which looks into indigenous and white relations in Australia with reference to privilege and the inevitable problematic nature of indigenous activism from a white person.
I think similar problems can occur within the feminist community. This is the link to the article. You can't teach people not to rape. Plus rape is against the law and is not acceptable, But their will always be rapists, Just like their will always be thieves. You don't put a sign in front of your house saying "don't tell me to lock my doors, teach people not to steal.
Same here, protect yourself and quit living in this fantasy where rape, murder, and thief are things that won't exist. Bear in mind, I build this comment and it had been not allowed to be printed on a Jezebel Thread or the Feministe Thread. The glee of running white ladies down on this twitter campaign - they co-sign as editorial policy.
It feels like we have a tendency to ar currently putting in a crab bucket of feminism. There ar fashions. Right now, the style in core feminism is to attack white feminists with a free pass.
I'd rather, honestly that folks UN agency have a criticism of "white feminists" mention names and argue points. Instead, though it looks harmful, the attack is to an entire cluster.
Safer and additional chicken shit. Get award-winning feminist analysis straight to your inbox: Sign up for our Weekly Reader! Search form Search. Culture intersectionality race intersectionality. Leave this field blank. Loved every bit of this article.
0コメント