Women don’t just have a voice, they are forcing institutions to listen.

December 11, 2014 10:12 AM

Top Feminist Hashtags of 2014, and the accompanying infographic; Time Magazine's overview of Feminism on social media (trigger warning for domestic abuse). An alternative view: The trouble with Twitter Feminism. Bonus link: Wikipedia entry on Networked Feminism and examples.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (25 comments total)

Incredible how many of those hashtags are not just feminist, but concerned with black feminism/womanism and intersectional social justice issues.

I don't think it's very fair to anyone to link to that feministcurrent blog post as an "alternative view." Clearly people are effectively using Twitter for productive discourse and movement building, especially black women. Apparently they are doing it wrong?

(For the record, I don't personally care for Twitter nor do I use it - I think it brings out the worst in me, and I understand some of the critiques that Meghan Murphy attempts to make, but I don't agree with her underlying thesis.)
posted by muddgirl at 10:19 AM on December 11, 2014 [8 favorites]

Yeah, that feministcurrent blog is less an alternative view and more "WOC use Twitter very effectively as they are marginalized from white feminism and I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY THEY DON'T LIKE ME THEIR WHITE ALLY."

2nding muddgirl in that I get what she is trying to say but it is coming off as entitled and how dare they pick on me.
posted by Kitteh at 10:25 AM on December 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

The trouble with people who write about the trouble with Twitter Feminism is that they only care about their @replies - their fame, basically - and not about the people who are listening and learning and taking note. There is more than one kind of engagement.

I have learned more from Black Feminist Twitter in the last 120ish days than I have learned about racism and feminism probably in my entire 42 years. But I'm STFU except for retweets because shutting my damn mouth and listening is what I need to be doing right now.

I can't really say the same about white feminists on Twitter, and I know there's a lot of reasons beyond just being kind of insufferable, so maybe the problem is with white Twitter Feminism. Perhaps a lesson could be learned from listening to someone else for one goddamned minute?
posted by Lyn Never at 10:28 AM on December 11, 2014 [59 favorites]

how do i favourite Lyn Never's comment a bajillion times
posted by Kitteh at 10:30 AM on December 11, 2014 [4 favorites]

We'll each make half a bajillion sockpuppets :)
posted by muddgirl at 10:35 AM on December 11, 2014 [6 favorites]

I am really glad that 2014 has been such a good, loud year for feminism, and how inclusion of color, transgender and such has become a bigger issue.

Conversely I learned this year that it doesn't matter what sort of feminist I (or anyone else) might be--my feminism is wrong, and I'm awful for it. The place that taught me that is Jezebel, and I will not be going back.

So I'm really glad for all these other voices, because God knows I need places to go that aren't the same place my friends always link to.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 10:36 AM on December 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

I dunno. I've been seeing a fair amount of tribalism, shutting down of discourse, and "cool witty cliques squaring off against all oncomers" stuff on twitter, in the last year or so, which has turned me off a bit. I'm on board with Lyn Never's comment though. It's probably who I was following, and it's no doubt a good idea to follow Black/PoC Feminist Twitter and just listen.
posted by naju at 11:03 AM on December 11, 2014 [6 favorites]

I have a lot of Important Feels about the digital divide w/r/t hashtag (and many other forms of) activism's inherent minimization of the perspectives of remote and/or low SES populations who can't avail themselves of internet access, but aside from that, it's been a thrilling development to watch from the outside, to see all the long-silenced voices band together and raise up a hue and cry. Since I'm not involved in reading or posting on any social media site, my only exposure to any of this stuff is through these kind of top-level postmortems and the subsequent MeFi threads about them, and they're always such a pleasure to dig into after the dust has settled.

EX: The Time overview's link to #YesAllWomen actually (accidentally or accidentally-on-purpose? oh, I hope it's the latter) directs to #YesAllWhiteWomen, which brought me here, which brought me here, which brought me here: White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.

Whites are taught to see their perspectives as objective and representative of reality (McIntosh, 1988). The belief in objectivity, coupled with positioning white people as outside of culture (and thus the norm for humanity), allows whites to view themselves as universal humans who can represent all of human experience. This is evidenced through an unracialized identity or location, which functions as a kind of blindness; an inability to think about Whiteness as an identity or as a "state" of being that would or could have an impact on one's life. In this position, Whiteness is not recognized or named by white people, and a universal reference point is assumed. White people are just people. Within this construction, whites can represent humanity, while people of color, who are never just people but always most particularly black people, Asian people, etc., can only represent their own racialized experiences (Dyer, 1992).

Seeing so many white feminists react so petulantly to #YesAllWhiteWomen and sentiments like the above makes me despair; aside from trying to STFU to educate myself and calling all the racists out on their rank bullshit whenever I see or hear it, I feel like all I can do is cross my fingers and hope more of them will catch the drift, close their mouths, and open their ears.

So it gives me a frisson of glee to see these truths laid out so plainly, and the whole paper [PDF] (not to mention #YAWW itself) is well worth a read. While the above-linked paper was published in 2011, so it predates the high-water mark for #activism by a few years, I'm not sure if this topic and others like it would have been able to make it off of the pages of The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy (!) and onto the pages of Time without the aid of the new wave of social media and the efforts of a dedicated cadre of badass intersectional feminists hell-bent on bringing strength, vigor, and solidarity to a sad and painful world.

Thanks for the post, bonus points for the awesome title!
posted by divined by radio at 12:08 PM on December 11, 2014 [15 favorites]

Is Jezebel even still considered feminist? I thought the International Feminist Steering Committee had disqualified them.

Seriously though, I see having more diversity in feminism as a necessary thing. If feminism is going to be successful as a large scale movement, it cannot do so by taking one subset of cultural experience and classifying it as universal.
posted by happyroach at 12:18 PM on December 11, 2014

can't avail themselves of internet access

Twitter works via SMS also.
posted by Bentobox Humperdinck at 1:07 PM on December 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Incredible how many of those hashtags are not just feminist, but concerned with black feminism/womanism and intersectional social justice issues.

posted by muddgirl at 1:19 PM on December 11

That's because Black Twitter is, and continues to be, a thing.
posted by magstheaxe at 3:13 PM on December 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

As much as I agree with everything that has been posted about the "trouble" article, this quote:

I think it’s a place where intellectual laziness is encouraged, oversimplification is mandatory, posturing is de rigueur, and bullying is rewarded.

Jumped out at me. It puts in to words well something that's been bugging me about the Internet as a whole for a while now. I think the directions she takes that aren't all that great, but I can't shake that one quote.
posted by Itaxpica at 3:31 PM on December 11, 2014 [6 favorites]

Isn't most of that true in many real-world communities as well? The common factor isn't technology, it's people.
posted by muddgirl at 3:38 PM on December 11, 2014 [6 favorites]

I admit to some disappointment that #feministprincessbride didn't make this list, but really it's a great round up.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 3:40 PM on December 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

Seeing so many white feminists react so petulantly to #YesAllWhiteWomen and sentiments like the above makes me despair; aside from trying to STFU to educate myself and calling all the racists out on their rank bullshit whenever I see or hear it, I feel like all I can do is cross my fingers and hope more of them will catch the drift, close their mouths, and open their ears.

I think that, and talking about how we have done racist things, and talking to white women - and perhaps even building some sort of support for white women grappling with being white? Could this be a thing?

Chris Rock's statement that all of the racism improvements have been by and about white people really hit home for me. I feel like I want to do something with what he (and honestly, likely tons of people before him, but this was the one that stuck) said.

No idea what, though. Anyone have any ideas?
posted by Deoridhe at 3:42 PM on December 11, 2014

I treasure the intersectionalist internet, particularly tumblr & twitter, because this whitish female-ish queer can just listen. If my mere attention adds views/pagerank/followers, so much the better. But listening and staying out of the way now, supporting folks acting on their own behalf. later.
posted by Dreidl at 4:00 PM on December 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

So easy to be against glib takedowns, so hard not to
third wavers whose postmodern indoctrination have them believing feminism is a series of made-up words and that identity politics are radical

Hmmmmmmm.

So yeah, absolutely it's better for dissension within a movement to manifest as debate rather than ad hom , and I don' t think Meghan Murphy is wrong for saying that the internet makes it really easy and rewarding to choose the latter. If the real issue is whether the structure and culture of Twitter promotes truly hurtful behavior more than other fora, maybe what what I'm about to say makes me guilty of avoiding the point and focusing on the personality behind it.

But it seems a little off for Meghan Murphy to be talking about the importance of movement-building since as far as I can tell a big part of what she does is provocative critiques (like a series of blog posts at xoJane labeled "UNPOPULAR OPINION") of individualist/liberal/"sex positive" feminism from her Left/collective/second-wave/anti-porn feminist perspective. That's not all she does but it doesn't take a lot of reading to figure out that her unpopularity among some internet feminists is probably related to her propensity for calling out their personal notions of feminism as Doing It Wrong. Which doesn't make her "Satan" and she has no obligation to ally with people who she believes to hold incompatible views but that goes both ways and it doesn't exactly make her a big-tent coalition-builder.

And of course the bit about are poor women on Twitter?." Well, they're on Twitter more than they are in academia or, say, running feminist web magazines, or...
posted by atoxyl at 4:26 PM on December 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Isn't most of that true in many real-world communities as well? The common factor isn't technology, it's people.

There's some truth to that, but I think the major differentiation is nuance. In person, it's possible to explain things and have discussions, at least most of the time. Online, if your opinion can't fit in to two dozen words or less it basically doesn't matter, and somebody's gonna yell at you for having it.
posted by Itaxpica at 5:25 PM on December 11, 2014 [4 favorites]

I dunno, in my experience these topics can be even harder to discuss in person, because people WILL raise their voices in real life, and it's even worse to get "yelled at", say, in an office or restaurant or car where you can't just step away from the screen.

Like I said, I don't use twitter because I don't think I'm meant for 140 character discourse, but a lot of people use it very effectively, with nuance, without yelling. It's an incredibly frictionless platform for sharing lived experiences, which is primarily how I consume other people's tweets.
posted by muddgirl at 5:46 PM on December 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

Damnit you ever spend a long time editing/rewriting something to get it exactly the way you want and actually end up creating a bunch of typos from doing so much copy/paste and rearranging? Sorry, I think my sentences are mostly intact and coherent though.
posted by atoxyl at 5:47 PM on December 11, 2014

Yeah, that feministcurrent blog is less an alternative view and more "WOC use Twitter very effectively as they are marginalized from white feminism and I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY THEY DON'T LIKE ME THEIR WHITE ALLY."

That's a really, really uncharitable reading of the post, especially as WOC weren't even mentioned. Why did you make it about that?
posted by Summer at 2:14 AM on December 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Honestly because I follow a lot of black feminists on Twitter and see white feminists like Meghan Murphy co-opt their hashtags, not give credit to WOC for igniting important discussions, and then when they get called out on it, they double down or worse, pull the "but I'm helping you!" card when no one asked for their help. White feminists enjoy an immense amount of privilege than black feminists do and that article is a near-perfect distillation of reading that every day.

So all that criticism MM is talking about? It's apparent to whom she is referring to. She just knows if she names names and says anything damning again, she will get piled on again.
posted by Kitteh at 4:59 AM on December 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

So you didn't react to the post, you reacted to what you thought the post was really about? Seems like a pretty good example of the sort of bad faith arguing she is referring to.

I also follow a lot of Twitter feminists of all stripes (not MM though) and I see a lot of piling on and calling out on all sides. It happens to everyone because it is the kind of hateful, tribal behaviour that Twitter specialises in, and she's right, it's toxic.

For me, the reactions in this thread prove her argument.
posted by Summer at 5:06 AM on December 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

Nope, it's just predictable and tiresome that articles which talk about how awful Twitter feminism is are invariably written by men or white women (Michelle Goldberg's particularly odious piece for The Nation comes to mind). Is Twitter feminism perfect? Nope, but then neither is it anywhere else. But I am damn glad it exists as a platform for awesome WOC in a movement that is still has a ways to go in terms of intersectionality.
posted by Kitteh at 5:21 AM on December 12, 2014

I think that, and talking about how we have done racist things, and talking to white women - and perhaps even building some sort of support for white women grappling with being white? Could this be a thing?

For sure! Start conversations about it whenever you can. It's been really encouraging to note a recent uptick in my white friends, acquaintances, and even co-workers actively wanting to talk about the effects of racism and white privilege -- it's something I can't remember happening before in my life.

My dad isn't white, so I learned about race when I was really young and haven't really had to grapple with being white because I've been aware that it is A Thing in my life, something that makes many, many people treat me very differently than they would treat my own father, since I was a kid. Like, he's Native but I guess he looks Mexican (and there are a lot more Mexicans than Native folks where we're from besides), so occasionally people approach him in supermarkets and car washes and restaurants and start speaking to him as though he must be a store employee. Sometimes they even try to order him around in Spanish. And when I asked him why they'd do that, I remember his answer being very euphemistic and gentle (which makes sense, I was probably only 6 or 7), like "a lot of people with pink skin assume a lot of people with brown skin are workers" or something, and that's when I learned how much easier my life was going to be because I was pale on the outside, like my mom, and not dark like my dad.

To get down to the point, I feel like how my dad brought it up to me is often how I have to explain white privilege to other white people, SO gently, like you would talk to a child about it, because people get REALLY defensive about it REALLY fast, and when they get defensive -- as can be observed in the gross kneejerk responses to #YesAllWhiteWomen -- they stop listening. But I also have zero shame about calling someone out on the carpet, "That's racist!" style, because it's important to let people know when they're behaving or speaking inhumanely.

Chris Rock's statement that all of the racism improvements have been by and about white people really hit home for me. I feel like I want to do something with what he (and honestly, likely tons of people before him, but this was the one that stuck) said.

No idea what, though. Anyone have any ideas?

In my own tiny, inconsequential, uneducated way, the thing I'm trying to work on the hardest is increasing the volume of the voices of people who aren't white, in an attempt to stop my fellow white folks from believing that their experience can or should be universalized as an experience of People rather than as an experience of White People. White folks are very prone to centering their own voices in any conversation, even when they mean well -- guilty as charged -- so I really feel like the best thing I can do is to shut my mouth and just hold a megaphone up whenever people of color are talking about their lives and experiences. I have nothing useful to add to the conversation myself; their voices are the ones that matter, so all I can do is try to elevate them.

For example, and this just my own personal cause of choice, but one out of every thirteen black Americans are legally prohibited from voting -- more than 7%. Thinking about the machinations that have been in place since this country's inception just to ensure those millions of voices would be silenced makes me feel sick and ashamed to be an American. Less representation at the ballot box means less representation at every level of government means fewer laws are introduced or passed with a population's best interests in mind -- it's a self-propelling cycle by design. So I feel like the most useful thing I can do is to start chipping away at the ground floor of issues that disproportionately silence and subjugate populations of color. Try to expand access to the ballot box. Vote and speak out against racist voter ID laws. Work to reinstate voting rights to felons. Make white people more aware of the disgusting racial disparities in arrest, sentencing, police brutality, and disenfranchisement.

This is getting pretty far afield from the topic at hand, but I think it echoes an important aspect of Black Twitter, et al in that these are all movements designed to amplify and center voices and perspectives that have been pushed to the side and minimized for centuries. Feminism writ large has needed this specific kick in the ass for a really long time, so it's been incredibly cool to be able to watch it happen!
posted by divined by radio at 7:31 AM on December 12, 2014 [9 favorites]