in case it gets deleted in case I get banned

[maevele]

I just want to restate that in my determination to bring shit back up yesterday, here and elsenet, my intnt was never to imply that liss was acting in anything less than good faith. i was not at any point trying to criticize Melissa in particular, but to think about it as a symptom of the transphobia/cis centrism of the larger feminist scene. The fact that even melissa, who i do firmly believe acts in good faith, and who is pretty well educated on matters of feminism and intersectionality, wasn't aware of Daly's trans issues, and that it doesn't even register in most feminist's minds to stop and check if any given second wave radfem promotes transhate before praising them, given how many of them fucked that up, really says something about how the larger feminist dialogue ignores the ugly racist transphobic etc etc, history of feminism.

and i thought that was way more significant than "oooh, liss fucked up!" it speaks to me of larger things that need fixing within even the best of modern feminism. and i count this blog (shakes) among the best of modern feminism.

--not that I am planning on getting banned there, but I didn't plan to have anything else i posted their deleted.

Comments

[cynthia1960]

Way back when I first read Daly (close to 30 years ago now), what she was writing about was extremely challenging to me, and it made me reconsider the belief system I grew up with. I hadn't read her in years, and had known about her refusal to teach men, but hadn't understood how transhate and racism factored into her work. It's only been in the last decade (since I found WisCon in '98) that I started understanding that gender is far more complicated than I had ever imagined, and that Daly fucks up when she goes all essentialist.

It's a salutary lesson to look at somebody who was quite influential in my past, and re-examine her work using the lessons I'm still learning. There's some stuff that may be still useful, and a lot of it is utter crap.

I do agree that Shakesville is one of the better sites out there.

[amadi]

Something else that says something about the larger feminist dialogue is the wagon-circling that's going on over there right now. I'm not at all comfortable with the idea of pointing fingers and saying "you're not being sufficiently nice!" and letting that shut down all critical dialogue. I'm really twitchy about the whole thing.

[sasha_feather]

There is a post about this at FWD/Forward:
http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/01/09/lines-in-the-sand-daly-showalter-and-tactics-of-exclusion/

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

Who is Melissa?? How come I never know what is happening??

[maevele.livejournal.com]

shakesville's liss. the mary daly thing still

[tessibean.livejournal.com]

[maevele.livejournal.com]

gurl, be glad you don't know. short version, last feminist blog i still liked, shakesville, uncritically posted a eulogy for OG transphobe radfem superhero mary daly, and although I don't hold it against the blogger as such, because most of feminism ignores the transphobia, I just keep trying to talk about the level of ignoring it takes for even said blogger to not have known.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

Makes it pretty clear that she had only a passing familiarity with Daly's work -- in which case, what the fuck are you doing writing a eulogy for her?

[maevele.livejournal.com]

she didn't write it, she neutrally reposted it with an RIP and such.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

Gotcha.

[annaham.livejournal.com]

I agree with this.

[pretzelcoatl.livejournal.com]

Did someone give you a hard time for talking about it?

[maevele.livejournal.com]

not here, but i got one comment deleted, and i think two threads frozen

[pretzelcoatl.livejournal.com]

Damn, that's awful.

[maevele.livejournal.com]

well, I get that liss was feeling piled on, and it is her space, so her mod's make the decisions, and I don't want to make her feel more piled on, cuz it ain't all her and I have this Problem with letting things drop.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

At the same time, the reaction when people were like "wtf, this is problematic" located the problem in the commenters and absolved Melissa and the moderators from everything, and the second post was about how much it hurts Melissa to be called out.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I think it was great that you raised the issue, and I thought you were very clear and appropriate.

The problem is (and I've encountered it too--I'm JupiterPluvius over there) is that there's so much crazy trolling there that people freak out in the same way about legitimately presented critique.

And I completely agree that the "conventional wisdom" about feminism is immersed in an essentialist, white, middle-class, cis gender perspective that keeps racism and transphobia and class prejudice from making it onto the radar of The Official Story. Even for people who are trying to stay aware of those issues--they're not going to get the information about that stuff from most academic Women's Studies/Gender Studies journals or Ms. or the Seal Press (p-too!) catalogue.

[rachel-swirsky.livejournal.com]

I thought that you spoke clearly and that your points made sense and were not attacky in any way.

I think everyone felt attacked by someone else and it put everyone in defensive mode so they couldn't really listen to someone saying something else which was subtly (but importantly) differentiated from the original point.

I'm not saying this to knock them. Blogging and moderating the way Melissa does is an intensely difficult thing, and very emotionally draining. I just think their understandable reaction ended up mowing over your point.

Let me know if you want to write about this (about your feelings on the way the treatment of Daly in mainstream feminist blogs is reflective of cis-centrism, not the internal politics of Shakesville) and do a guest post for Alas. I mean, Alas has a zillion problems as a forum, but we could lock it to feminist-only comments or whatever you want, if you think it would be productive to post there.

[maevele.livejournal.com]

I'll take you up on that guest post thing, just give me a couple day to knock something together. I don't know if I'm the best person to start that discussion, but I'll try.

[rachel-swirsky.livejournal.com]

No worries. Just let me know.