It's not FOR you.

[puella_nerdii]

Boy, '09 sure seems like the year of PrivilegeFail in fandom, doesn't it? This time, however, there's fail coming in from both sides there are arguments put forth by both camps that I'm uncomfortable with.

Brief background: The Lambda Literary Foundation revises/clarifies/what-have-you their mission statement, which results in a revision of the

Comments

[kynn]

...namely the one that white women never experience oppression. Via keeva on Dreamwidth:

Actually, that's a pretty inaccurate misstatement of my position. See the comments on my post for more details, but the gist of it is that SurveyFail was processed by the vast majority of people who commented on it in a very different way than how anti-oppression posters dealt with RaceFail and MammothFail. Almost always, SurveyFail was seen as an individual person's personal failings (which it was), but rarely was it addressed in the larger context of societal oppressions, privilege, and institutional sexism/transphobia (which it could have been).

Saying I believe, based on my analysis of SurveyFail, that "white women never experience oppression" is ridiculous. Since I don't believe that, and I've never said that. I'd appreciate it if you'd stop putting words in my mouth, especially in the context of trying to form some sort of false equivalency -- "there's fail coming in from both sides" -- between what some people have written and what you incorrectly attribute to me.

Thanks.

keeva @ Dreamwidth

[kynn]

I wrote more about this here, including how I fucked up what I meant to say, ended up looking pretty damn stupid, what I really wanted to say, and how I could still end up looking stupid anyway! Enjoy.

[kynn]

Er... here. Geez, I should just get some sleep instead of trying to post. :)

[puella_nerdii]

Sorry it took me this long to get back to you -- it's been a long weekend.

I'm sorry I misrepresented your position on the latter -- that was overreaching on my part, and I apologize for it. I'll emend the post.

Regarding SurveyFail, I still disagree; I'm thinking largely about the meta arising before the protest art surfaced, which did shift the nature of the discussion, but most of the commentary I saw on my friendslist, and on posts like the ones thingswithwings and eruthros made on DW, talked about SurveyFail in the context of pathologizing and misrepresenting women's sexuality, specifically fannish women's sexuality. Yes, the individual failings of the researchers were discussed -- in regards to their methodology, largely, which really was awful -- but this statement by eruthros struck me:
It's the same old sociobiological bullshit, the same old attempts to universalize and naturalize their ideas of gender roles, the same old approach that makes us nothing but a data set.
Admittedly, most of the commentary I read came from people who participated in kink_bingo on dreamwidth, an explicitly sex-, queer-, and kink-positive challenge, so a lot of the discussion I saw used the ideology of the former (about the healthiness of all different types and modes of sexual desire) to point out what the latter did wrong.