Afterword:
Finding the Past in the Present
If you have signed on to this issue of the Barnard Center for
Research on Women's Web journal, The Scholar & Feminist Online,
then you most likely already know that the Internet is a hotbed of young
feminist activity. You know that more than half of all bloggers are,
perhaps like you, under the age of 30. And you know that Pinko Feminist
Hellcat and Echidne of the Snakes
are neither circus acts nor rock bands
but pseudonyms for some of the smartest and edgiest women bloggers
around. You know that they and other women bloggers are offering vital
critiques of business as usual, forging virtual rooms of their own and
doing their best to creatively integrate the male-dominated political
virtual water coolers the Internet has spawned, all the while infusing
the online world with a spirit exhilarating and new.
But maybe you are a reader seeking to understand what all this fuss
about the feminist blogosphere is about. After reading this issue, you
know that, contrary to popular belief, half of all bloggers are members
of the supposedly less outspoken sex. You remember a time, before the
Internet, when women came together to talk politics in kitchens and
church basements instead of online, a time when "clicks" referred not to
clicks of a mouse but to clicks of awareness and transformations in
consciousness. A time when surfing had to do with oceans, waves meant
water, and the "where-are-the-women" debate referred to the paucity of
women in non-pink-collar occupations, not the lack of visibility of
women bloggers on the "A-list."
But wait. Feminism then and feminism now—at least as the contributors
to this issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online envision them—are
not as different as they look. If you were active in the women's
movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, surely some of the questions
raised in this issue must sound familiar. When Gwendolyn Beetham and
Jessica Valenti write in their introduction that blogging is "an
exciting new way to think about activism," maybe it reminds you of an
earlier moment when feminists were trying out and debating new forms—all
those speak-outs and flush-ins and strikes for equality. Tracy Kennedy
makes the point most directly when she writes about "virtual
consciousness raising" as a tool for promoting cultural change.
Kennedy's invocation of tracts by radical feminists Carol Hanisch and
Kathie Sarachild makes clear the analogy between feminist blogging and
an earlier feminist generation's method of high-speed connection.
If you are a "Third Wave" reader, you are likely both frustrated and
increasingly galvanized by the need to level the virtual playing field.
If you are a "Second Waver," maybe these continuities surprise or
disappoint you, or maybe they confirm your sense that things, sadly, are
not all that different today. Perhaps, upon reading Clancy Ratliff's
analysis of the frat-like clubhouse atmosphere that dominates the
political blogosphere of the Left today—"Wonkette is INFINITELY more
interesting because she's got a decent-to-good rack" posts one male blog
reader—it stirred up memories of a time when men of the then-New Left
professed being more interested in the bodies than the brains of women
fighting alongside them in the antiwar and Civil Rights movements. The
continuity doesn't end there. Almost all of the topics the bloggers in
this issue are blogging about for this issue have roots in debates of
the past. As Shireen Mitchell's account of the race, class, and gender
biases that continue to limit access to technology makes clear,
discrimination is not yet sheer history. Discussions of being women in a
male-dominated sphere bring to mind "Second Wave" descriptions of what
it was like to be one of the rare females in the newsroom, on the
masthead, or on the air. Pam of Pandagon's rant against white-male and
class privilege in the upper reaches of what she calls "blogistan" and
her discussion of the "virtual glass ceiling" recall earlier rants
against the corporate glass ceiling and the sticky floor. Ratliff's
exploration of women bloggers who use their sexuality to draw attention
to their political musings taps into current controversies about today's
sexual politics—what Ratliff calls the "subversive, strategic
appropriation of femininity"—but also implicitly invokes the "sex wars"
of an earlier decade, when feminists turned assumptions about sex,
politics, and women's agency on their head. Echidne of the Snake's
discussion of "anti-feminist trolling" of course brings to mind previous
antifeminist outpourings and interruptions that have served to silence
debate. Tedra Osell's account of women's pseudonymous blogging call up
previous moments when women have voiced the unspoken through the
strategically placed and often anonymous written word.
In each case, these writers take the conversations to new levels, new
frequencies, informed by the contexts in which they connect. Many of
their topics herald new sounds in the world. Pinko Feminist Hellcat's
thread on the importance of "comments" on blogs as part of the public
political conversation could only take place in an Internet era, and
Margaret Ervin's whirlwind tour of the online feminist frontier surveys
the most recent developments. A novel language of "hit rates" and
"trackbacks" introduces not merely new lingo but new concepts, ripe for
exploration at the hands—or rather, the keyboards—of a new generation of
activist-scholars. New questions inevitably emerge: What is the effect
of women's political blogging on women's involvement in offline
politics? What is the relationship between online activism and offline
change? Perhaps in future issues of The Scholar & Feminist
Online, such questions will continue to be addressed.
When Janet Jakobsen and I co-founded The Scholar & Feminist
Online in 2003, we hoped that it would become a space where events
and discussions launched by the Barnard Center for Research on Women
would find an ongoing archival life, a hybrid forum where the online and
offline worlds could meet to forge something new. As the editors and
essayists and bloggers whose thoughts are recorded in this innovative
issue prove, that hope has become a reality, both virtual and
concrete.
This issue takes full advantage of its online environment, proving
that today, as in the past, feminist scholars and thinkers are at the
forefront of cultural experiment and innovation. If the naysayers are
still asking themselves, "Where are the women bloggers?", it is only
because they don't know where to look. That question brings to mind one
other, frequently asked, yet also misleadingly framed: "Where are the
young feminists?" The answer to both? Right here.
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