I declared that my Jackie Kay post was a sidetrack from a larger point, but I never got around to saying what the larger point actually was. This is it, and it's an exhortation to non-Americans -- in particular, to non-American, Western white folk like me -- not to disregard online (and offline) discussions of race and racism because they seem US- ( Read more... )

There's a very interesting conversation between Robin Anne Reid and Sean Griffin up at Henry Jenkins's blog here and here and mirrored on LJ at fandebate here, part of a summer project discussing gender hierarchies in fan studies. I commented in response to some discussions about essentialism, and ended up coming up with a mini-theory about fandom and ( Read more... )

If my last post sounded very dispassionate and unemotional, know that I feel neither of those things. I'm deeply upset and I'm livid with fury that people's lives can be so completely disregarded, that to make the most basic public demand for the right of everyone to live and work can be something that apparently merits what I have just described ( Read more... )

I went to a conference today, and one of the papers I heard was about women and blogging. It was a good paper, and it spoke to the experiences I have had in feminist online community on LiveJournal, and on DiaryLand and the BUST boards before that: deeply personal stories shared and comfort taken while seeing things through a critical, political ( Read more... )