Who DO you think you are, or, "Gee, bitch, I didn't know you had a blog!"

Nobody asked me to do this meme but I’ve seen it around and it in combination with this post at Woman of Color make me feel like I need discuss some things. (Though neither is any of my business, just me snooping around) Another exigence—posting around on prof-authored blogs, I offered some advice and got a request to share material. Teaching is often about finding the right thing to steal and modify so I diligently removed my real name and The University’s from my materials and dutifully emailed them off. Once I got the reply, I realized that in all my diligence, I sent the email with my University signature: full name, rank, department, division, address AND University email address. I felt some horror for about 15-20 minutes. and realized that I needed to address this not in the coy way I have (coyness usually indicates a hidden-almost-from-self discomfort) but honestly and in context. Grading-addled as I am (nothing like when first started teaching but the mechanical grading ability wears out after a semester), I will cobble together what struck me and set me to thinking in both, with proper linkage of course.

On a different note, I would also like to bring up an issue that has been bothering me a bit lately.

The radical women of color blog ring states that to join the ring, a blogger must identify as a woman of color on her blog. This seems to be quite a simple requirement, but as I am learning more of the various reasons that many of us are blogging, I am beginning to think that this simple requirement is actually very loaded with serious issues for women of color.

First, many of us are blogging specifically because blogging allows a gender/race neutral space. …

Textaisle at Arbusto uses the "nuetral-ness" of the blogosphere as an act of resistance:


Through conscientious omissions of any of several other identities, I feel I, as a blogger, can better highlight the contradictions, strains, and overlappings entre las identidades that I play with as known quantities.


Thus, it is clear that many radical women of color who are blogging are choosing to not "come out" about their identity. …

posted by brownfemipower at 2/25/2006 09:38:00 PM

It had never occurred to me to not identify myself by race or gender b/c both are critical aspects of how I interpret the world and why I felt I had something to add to the blogosphere. When younger, in high school and perhaps my first few months in college, I would’ve believed in the gender-/race-neutral possibilities and potentials of the virtual spaces of the Internet in general, and clung fiercely to them. But I was not raised, didn’t grow up, didn’t get through decades of life race- or gender-neutral but highly identified and rewarded and restricted by and for both.

Is my refusal to be neutral radical? Is my insistence upon being in this space, shouting, ranting, being “unladylike” radical? Is it my dueling impulses of non-neutrality and non-nationalism? (Bad writing seeps in from the grading.) To be blatantly, defiantly race- and gender-identified but also say that neither race nor gender are essentialist, that I am fueled by yet not constrained by either/both?

Or...?

will continue………….





tag: race, identity, feminism, women of color, blogging