This is a cross-post of a guest post for Ashley at Small Strokes Fell Big Oaks

The theme of this series, Teaching Feminism, is near and dear to my heart. I recently graduated with my master’s in English, and I spent much of last and this year researching feminist pedagogy to write my master’s thesis. In my thesis, I focused on creating a women-only, feminist developmental composition class for the community college setting. Despite the specificity of this focus, many of the issues I addressed have great import for the secondary classroom as well.

In my research, I found that there are broadly two ways to “do” feminism in the classroom. The first is by way of incorporating feminist/woman-centric content. Ashley — my gracious host — has demonstrated this in her post about teaching “The Yellow Wallpaper” and discussing its gendered themes outright. The other way is touched on by guest blogger Laura in her post about the importance of respect in feminist classrooms: instructional technique is another important way for feminist teachers to teach and do feminism in their classrooms. For the purposes of this post, I’ll be focusing on this second way of doing feminism in schools, with a few ideas for classroom activities to demonstrate or practice these techniques here and there.

But first, some theoretical background:

Feminist pedagogy is deeply rooted in the examination of power relationships in society. In its inception in the 1960s and 1970s (at least in the US), feminist pedagogy was primarily concerned with gendered power relationships; however, as feminist pedagogy has grown and adapted to our changing society, feminist pedagogy has become concerned with all kinds of power relationships. Really, feminist pedagogy keeps up with feminist activism at large: as mainstream feminists have redefined what it means to be a feminist — not just fighting male privilege, but calling into question white, class, able-bodied, and cis privilege — so has feminist pedagogy redefined its boundaries. Therefore, feminist pedagogy overlaps heavily with other liberatory pedagogies, such as critical pedagogy.

One power relationship that is called into question in feminist pedagogy, making it unlike other forms of feminist activism, is the teacher-student relationship. In traditional classrooms, especially those that use a “banking” approach, the teacher has complete control, complete power, and the student has none. The teacher is considered a benevolent dictator in such classrooms, and the persona of such traditional teachers takes on a bit of a colonialist air: they’re doing “what’s best” for the uncultured, blank-slate natives students.

In many ways, the public school system in the US promotes this sort of teacher-student relationship. You can see it in the way most classrooms are designed: blackboards on one side of the room make it easy for the teacher to stand there and pass down knowledge to the empty heads of the students, who are sitting individually in desks all facing the teacher. Even teachers who attempt to mitigate this by putting students in circles or desks in small groups face challenges and find themselves reverting to traditional techniques in order to pass knowledge on more efficiently. The standardized testing movement inspired by No Child Left Behind has also given traditional banking approaches to teaching new life. And it can be difficult to find the money to buy texts written by women and/or that address feminist concepts if your school has already sunk its dollars into “the classics” or into textbooks that don’t quite meet your needs.

Despite the many obstacles for feminist teachers, there are still many ways to enact a feminist pedagogy — because feminist pedagogy is so much about examining power: who has it and who doesn’t.

Again, the theme of the traditional classroom is the all-knowing teacher bestowing knowledge upon the ignorant student. This is a paternalistic conception of the classroom that disregards the knowledge that students already have and the fact that teachers are human and therefore flawed. Though the vast majority of teachers don’t actually teach this way and don’t actually believe their students know nothing, many, many students have experienced learning situations where their knowledge was ignored and they were treated as ignorant. Feminist pedagogy — even if it isn’t presented as such (which can be good in more hostile schools/districts or in classes where saying “feminist” would distract students more than help them) — can help all students, regardless of gender identity, feel more empowered in their learning.

What I think is excellent about instructional techniques associated with feminist pedagogy is that they’re just best practice when you get right down to it. Most of you reading probably already do a lot of these things in your classes. Now you have good reasoning for why it’s also feminist.

Small groups AND independent work

Obviously, we need to teach students how to work both independently and collaboratively: both are part of being human and, more practically, part of being a productive member of a workforce. (Having students work in small groups can also be a break for teachers who’ve been lecturing all day, and it gives students a chance to apply concepts hands-on.) However, the paternalistic patriarchs who administrate education and design standardized tests (and implement laws requiring standardized tests) have no interest in encouraging our students to work together for a common cause. We live in a patriarchal and therefore competitive society, one which devalues teamwork and collaboration and demands that each student be the best — at the cost of others’ success. Small group work has the potential to give students a chance to develop their teamwork skills, in addition to showing students that they, too, have the ability to create knowledge and to learn without the guidance of The Teacher. If implemented within a framework of authentic collaboration and student empowerment, group-work has the capacity to mess with all kinds of unfortunate and oppressive power relationships.

Authentic questions

Teacher educators call asking questions a way to gauge student understanding. I call asking questions a way for teachers to tell their students that knowledge is created and that they, too, can create knowledge — not just the teacher. The difference between gauging comprehension and empowering students, though, is in the question asked. There are “teacher questions” — the questions you already have the answer to — and there are authentic questions. Asking authentic questions — ones that you really don’t know the answer to and/or are aware that there are many possible answers to — allows students to play a useful role in the creation of knowledge. It also positions you, the teacher, as another learner, as someone who doesn’t have the answers and is engaging in the education process alongside students. You’re no longer the Holder of Knowledge: you’re a seeker of truths, your students have some of the answers, and you all have to talk it out to get the bigger picture.

Encouraging reflection in the name of student empowerment

As a composition teacher, I teach a lot of writing, and I assign a lot of papers. In the last couple of years, I have begun assigning reflective essays along with the typical essays students write in my class. This initially came out of a desire to show students that their learning is up to them, not me, that they can’t blame me for everything they don’t understand, that they earn grades rather than receiving them. (In other words, I was getting some disgruntled evaluations from students who thought they could get an A with C-level writing and no effort to improve their skills.) Even though the initial intent of these new reflective assignments was more practical in nature, I’ve come to see how fostering reflection is an important part of doing feminist pedagogy. My students generally see me as the Composition Expert who is going to pass down all of the “right” composition facts to them. Because I’m the “Expert,” they also see me as superior to them, which imbues my relationship with my students with a power differential. Reflective writing allows students to think about writing — or whatever other concepts they are addressing — in their own terms, to explain what they understand, and to see how it fits into their lives, either academically, personally, or both. My class becomes less about “doing what the teacher wants” and more about “this is what I learned and why it’s important to me” (especially because I don’t focus on grammar/mechanics/style as I read these papers). Creating an opportunity to see knowledge as constructed and to see their own personal role in how that knowledge is constructed helps students be empowered as individuals with agency in their educational lives.

Gender segregation

I commented on the first post in this series about the uses and misuses of sex/gender-segregation in the classroom. I think dividing classes into boys and girls has a lot of potential to benefit students. Not only does this allow for the discussion of sensitive topics without fear of shame from the “opposite sex,” but it allows both girls and boys to be more themselves without feeling the need to perform for each other. Gender segregation, however, can also inadvertently lead teachers and administrators down the “gender-based education” path, a path paved with gender stereotypes, sexism, and misogyny. I’m not sure that doing gender segregation within one classroom would be a good idea. But if your school has considered segregating genders into different classes, keep in mind that this can be a powerful way for students to examine gender — and it can also be damaging for them if classes are designed around gender stereotypes about how boys and girls learn. Basically, avoid people like Leonard Sax and his ilk when designing single-sex courses, and think about the many, many ways boys and girls benefit from both typically masculine and typically feminine forms of instruction.

I could go on and on about this stuff, but I’ll stop there for now. I am planning a follow-up post that will touch on some of the stickier parts of doing feminist pedagogy — such as what happens when embracing the “feminine” stops being feminist, dealing with conflict in a feminist space, and being a female feminist teacher who questions authority in her classroom — because, let’s be honest, the ideas I’ve discussed here are pretty mainstream. The revolutionary thing about this is calling mainstream approaches like this feminist. Yes, it’s excellent that these things are mainstream and an expected part of educational culture; however, without naming these approaches as feminist in intent and in creation, feminist pedagogy loses its relevance, its educational edge, and its healing power. So go out there, get your kids into groups and ask them to work as a team to accomplish a shared goal, and continue being a feminist pedagogue.

You may recall my personal nemesis, Satoshi Kanazawa, from this longwinded bit of commentary I did in 2007 in response to his ridiculous article, “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths about Human Nature.”

Well, Kanazawa is back! And not a minute too late, as I was starting to forget the bullshit that is evolutionary psychology! Without this reminder, I might have slipped into the comfort of thinking that evolutionary psychologists had realized the error of their ways and focused their research elsewhere (perhaps, my idealist mind ventured, they have begun looking into ways they can help prevent rape instead of excusing it with monkey-brain imperatives). Alas! No! I must be vigilant — the evo-psychos haven’t disappeared! They’ve simply dropped off my radar in order to return with even more stupidity, like stupid, stupid evo-psych zombies.

Kanazawa’s return illustrates that he’s rid his writing of any pretenses that he’s a reasonable, rational human being who cares about doing good things in the world: he has titled his most recent bit of evo-psych idiocy “Why modern feminism is illogical, unnecessary, and evil.” Thanks for the warning, Kanazawa! I was planning to give it the old good-faith go, but with a title like that, I know I’d just be wasting my time!

It’s a short article, so Kanazawa really has to pack in his misogyny and anti-feminism efficiently. I have to give him credit where it’s due, though: after a weekend of reading freshman argument essays featuring non-arguments, terrible organization, and unclear or absent transitions between ideas, Kanazawa does an excellent job of staying on point. He doesn’t fuck around, and I can respect that. It’s too bad my students are capable of better logic and better understanding of controversial topics such as feminism than Kanazawa, though.

Some choice passages:

First, modern feminism is illogical because, as Pinker points out, it is based on the vanilla assumption that, but for lifelong gender socialization and pernicious patriarchy, men and women are on the whole identical.

Oh, Kanazawa. I can’t tell if you’re being intentionally obtuse or if you genuinely believe that feminists argue that men and women are identical. I don’t know of a single feminist — or a single person, period — who sincerely believes that men and women are the same. What feminists do argue is that, despite our fundamental biological differences, men and women should be treated equally and/or with equity. The basic belief is that women are human. Hello, keep up, this is basic shit.

Further, modern feminism is unnecessary, because its entire raison d’être is the unquestioned assumption that women are and have historically always been worse off than men.  The fact that men and women are fundamentally different and want different things makes it difficult to compare their welfare directly, to assess which sex is better off; for example, the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women.

Ah, yes, the “unquestioned assumption” that patriarchy harms women, right. Because there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that, as a class, women are stalked, abused, raped, tortured, killed, and so on, by men, because they are women. This is just ideological propaganda we silly feminists pull out anytime we aren’t getting our way, right?

Oh, and the comparison between discrepancies in pay for the same job and in numbers of shoes owned, that’s classic! It’s not only belittling the real problem of the wage gap, but using a misogynist analogy to do it! I told you guys that Kanazawa was efficient!

It is also not true that women are the “weaker sex.”  Pinker documents the fact that boys are much more fragile, both physically and psychologically, than girls and hence require greater medical and psychiatric care.

Um, which feminists are arguing that women are the weaker sex? Jesus, get your fucking stereotypes right, at least. The problem, Kanazawa? The problem is that people like you act as if women are the weaker sex — your evo-psych bullshit plays a humongous role in perpetuating such harmful and annoying beliefs. Part of feminist activism is to get it into your brains that women are just as capable of doing basic, everyday tasks, such as lifting a grocery bag or opening a door, as men are. Not that difficult!

Another fallacy on which modern feminism is based is that men have more power than women.  Among mammals, the female always has more power than the male, and humans are no exception.  It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige.  They do, because they have to, in order to impress women.  Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to.  What do women control?  Men.  As I mention in an earlier post, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.

AHAHAHAHA. This is the oldest expression of misogyny in the book! You’re a hoot, Kanazawa. You just don’t quit with the hilarity.

I’ll let Andrea at Heartless Doll take this one for me:

See, ladies!? If you’re young and beautiful, you’re like Donald Fucking Trump! You don’t need feminism! Fuck all those ugly old ladies, anyway, right!? All you have to do is use your sexuality to manipulate idiot men with boners for brains–don’t you want to do that? Don’t you want to fuck me to get ahead, my little graduate assistant?!–and you are on top of the world! Or at least on top of the guy who’s on top of the world, and that’s just as good!

And after claiming that feminism makes everyone unhappy (unless you’re in a relationship with a feminist, I guess), Kanazawa ends with a bang:

At any event, the culpability of modern feminism in making women steadily unhappy, because it is based on false assumptions about male and female human nature, is difficult to deny.  Men’s happiness has not declined in the last 35 years, because there has not been masculinism; nobody has insisted on the radical notion that men are women[.]

DUDE. FEMINISM ISN’T ABOUT MAKING WOMEN INTO MEN. “MASCULINISM,” IF SUCH A THING WERE TO EXIST, WOULD NOT MAKE MEN INTO WOMEN. YOU ARE A GIANT IDIOT.

There will be spoilers for the movie Bruno in this post. Consider yourself warned.

Speaking of movies, interpretations, and feminist critiques, I finally saw Bruno last night. I do realize I’m a bit late on the subject (even though the movie was officially released in the US only a week ago), but I wanted to share my thoughts upon having seen the movie.

In case the title of this post doesn’t make it clear enough, I am not an expert on homophobia, which is a function of my hetero privilege. Despite my hetero identity, I see a clear relationship between homophobia and misogyny, so I’m better at identifying homophobia than your typical straight dude. Nevertheless, in an effort to mitigate this privilege, I work diligently to view commentary about the queer community with a critical eye. This was especially true with Bruno.

The big question people seem to have been asking about this movie is “But is it good for the gays?“. My sense is that the movie is a mixed bag in its ability to combat the homophobia it brings out in its audience and accidental participants.

There are a few scenes that are particularly effective in “showing that people’s attitudes can turn on a dime when they realize you’re gay,” as Out editor Aaron Hicklin explains to the NYTimes. In one such scene, Bruno goes onto a Jerry-Springer-esque talk show to talk about being a single parent. He appears to have the crowd on his side when they cheer to support his proclamations that being a single parent is tough — it’s when he says that he’s just waiting for “Mr. Right” to come along that the boos and the jeers and the shaking fists come out in full force. It’s okay to be a single parent, but not a gay single parent.

The last scene of the movie is also effective at highlighting the stupidity of homophobia: Bruno, as “Straight Dave,” enters a UFC ring and rallies the crowd with such homophobic cries as “My asshole’s only for shitting”. Before the real fight can begin, someone from the crowd calls “Straight Dave” a faggot, and Bruno/Dave demands that this person enter the ring and fight. This person turns out to be Bruno’s former lover, Lutz, and soon Bruno and Lutz are making out and caressing as the crowd watches on. Beer cups, trash, and shouts of anger pour onto the couple, who aren’t doing anything to the crowd; men crying, screaming, and beating their fists against their heads in homophobic anger appear on the screen. And just before the end of the scene, someone throws a folding chair.

Now, it’s not in the best of taste to take your lover’s clothes off in a fight ring, no matter your sexuality (not that good taste is important in Bruno’s world or in this movie). But a man and a woman — or, more hypocritical, a woman and another woman — doing the same thing would not have inspired this level of outright hatred and anger from the UFC crowd gathered there. The anxious hetero-masculinity — and the constant checks on other men required to keep hetero-masculinity in place — were tangible in this scene. And it was this scene where I think the movie succeeded in its goal to call homophobia (particularly homophobia against gay men) into question.

It’s unfortunate that the people who really need to such scenes won’t.  This movie has been over-hyped, and too many people know Sasha Baron Cohen’s schtick, which means that the homophobes who might have been tricked into seeing this film (like the racists and anti-Semites who saw Borat) will avoid it.

I’m also not entirely convinced at this point that the movie doesn’t cancel itself out anyway with the many scenes employing the “predatory gay” stereotype to make jokes. In at least three scenes, Bruno makes advances toward obviously straight men in ways that would scare the bejeezus out of me if I were in those situations, too. Not only does this not positively affect the men included in the scenes by compelling them to question their preconceptions, but these scenes allow the audience — mostly straight teenaged and twenty-something men — the indulge in traditional homophobia without question. For example, Bruno goes hunting with three other white men in an attempt to become straight. That night, after each man has gone off to his respective tent, Bruno goes to the tent of one of the other men and tells him that he’s afraid that one of the guys is gay and Bruno would like to sleep in this guy’s tent so they can keep each other safe. The other guy tells him to go back to sleep. A little while later, Bruno comes out of his tent naked and does pretty much the same thing, except this time asking specifically to get in the tent. The guy — understandably, in my opinion — gets upset with this behavior and — not so understandably — knocks the camera to the ground. My reading of such scenes was that Cohen felt it necessary to push into absurd territory in order to provoke the people around him.

Now, obviously, I’m not okay with the gay panic defense. None of the people around Bruno would be justified in hurting him simply because he came onto them or acted gay around them. And I also don’t think that “tolerance” is good enough — no one should settle for being “tolerated,” as if they’re some abhorrence to nature by simply existing. But in these scenes, Bruno is the predatory gay man, the stuff of homophobic fears, and the way these scenes play out does nothing to combat these fears. If Cohen and Bruno were consistently interested in critiquing homophobia, Bruno would not go to other people’s tents naked in the middle of the night, because that’s weird and not okay, no matter your gender or sexual orientation. Likewise, Bruno would not try to trick Ron Paul into having sex with him so Bruno can achieve fame by leaking a sex tape with a celebrity. I mean, really. For goodness’ sakes. These are not things that good and normal people do, and they ultimately hurt the cause that Baron claims he’s supporting.

So, Bruno is a mixed bag. It has its good points and its bad points when it comes to fighting homophobia. At least it tries — that’s more than most movies have going for them.

I know: Just a couple days ago I said I couldn’t be bothered to blog. Well, that has changed, because I remembered something that bothers me  and that prevents a lot of people from listening to and considering feminist perspectives.

Let me illustrate this something with an anecdote.

Earlier this year, I went to see the movie Taken with the boyf. The plot of this movie centralizes on a (white, American) man whose daughter (white, American, 16 or 17) travels to Europe and gets kidnapped. He figures out, with his Super Spy Abilities, that she has been taken by Albanian men who intend to sell her into the sex trade. So, Super-Spy-Dad goes on a rampage across Eastern Europe and the Middle East to find his daughter, slaughtering dozens of men along the way. As he searches for her, he finds many, many young women who have been drugged and tied to beds and who are or have been raped before they get auctioned off or donated to prostitution houses for good.

What does he do about that? Well, he leaves, obvz. He only has time to find his daughter!

And he does, eventually. Right before her virginal white body is sold to the highest bidder. And he kills a few dozen more brown men for good measure, just in case you didn’t get the point in the first two hours of the film.

Now, I get that Super-Spy-Dad is a flawed character — he’s sort of an anti-hero: you root for him because everyone else is worse, and you do want to see him rekindle his relationship with his daughter, which he can’t do if she’s dead, right? You’re not supposed to like him, exactly, and you’re meant to question his motives as well as his actions. But I left the movie feeling annoyed with the way it depicted the sex trade and with the way Super-Spy-Dad dealt with the sex trade. My personal feelings are that the movie was irresponsible in its portrayal of the sex trade because

1. Super-Spy-Dad couldn’t be bothered to save anyone except his (white, virginal, upper-middle-class) daughter from being drugged and raped;
2. Super-Spy-Dad used at least one of not two of these young women in his quest to find his daughter (he “saved” one because she was wearing his daughter’s jacket but was too drugged up to provide any clues — so he took her out of the prostitution house, gave her a warm bed, asked her where his daughter was, and then left without even a thank-you or an offer of other help); and
3. the sex trade element of the movie was just a plot point — nothing in the movie asked viewers to question the existence of the sex trade, or to look at it any more closely than “oh it sucks that she’s about to get sold off to some Middle Eastern dude.”

The moral of the story is that it’s Very Bad when white American virgin girls get sold off for sex, but when it’s those other women — the ones who are not American, the ones who are impoverished, the ones who are not white, the ones who are on drugs (whether they were before they were kidnapped or not), and the ones who are not virgins — it’s Just The Way It Goes. No use trying to save them! No use trying to stop the systematic rape and prostitution of young, poor, abused, non-white women! It’s just not worth it! There’s only time to save the white girl!

So, yeah, that’s my read on the movie. This isn’t to say it was a bad movie, or that it wasn’t entertaining, or that it didn’t live up to its purpose. I just didn’t like the use of the sex trade as plot furniture and the disavowal of race, nationality and class as having anything to do with the main characters. It was distracting. This is also not to say that any other movie is perfect, because no movie is perfect. That’s why we have movie critics! It’s part of the whole thing!

So, I told the boyf this, and he said he felt like I was guilt-tripping him into not liking a movie that he enjoyed.  I think this sort of reaction to differences in opinion and critiques of social mores promoted in popular media is all too common. I think we all need to stop taking critiques of texts personally, especially when they have a feminist bent to them.

In my reading this week, I stumbled across this article by Violet Blue writing for Oprah.com called “Are More Women OK with Watching Porn?”

But when the researchers showed gay, lesbian, and straight porn to heterosexual and homosexual women and men, they found that while the men responded more intensely to porn that mirrored their particular gender orientation, the women tended to like it all. Or at least their bodies did.

But that’s the hitch: Even when our bodies respond to what we’re seeing, not every woman feels empowered to enjoy the show. For years we’ve been told that we won’t — or shouldn’t — be turned on by porn, end of story, sleep tight.

The message has come from all sides — from conservative Christian organizations (“Traditionally, women are far more likely to engage in wistful, romantic fantasies than crude scenes of people engaging in sexual acts,” Kathy Gallagher, cofounder of Pure Life Ministries, has written) to the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon (who says porn exploits and discriminates against women, and encourages rape).

When everyone tells you that what you might be curious about, or even secretly like, is wrong, bad, sleazy, and shameful, you don’t have to cast a line very far to land a set of inhibitions.

But that’s the hitch: Even when our bodies respond to what we’re seeing, not every woman feels empowered to enjoy the show. For years we’ve been told that we won’t — or shouldn’t — be turned on by porn, end of story, sleep tight.

The message has come from all sides — from conservative Christian organizations (“Traditionally, women are far more likely to engage in wistful, romantic fantasies than crude scenes of people engaging in sexual acts,” Kathy Gallagher, cofounder of Pure Life Ministries, has written) to the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon (who says porn exploits and discriminates against women, and encourages rape).

When everyone tells you that what you might be curious about, or even secretly like, is wrong, bad, sleazy, and shameful, you don’t have to cast a line very far to land a set of inhibitions.

Blue makes the same basic rhetorical move here as Teh Boyfriend did when he responded to my take on Taken: You (radical feminist/girlfriend/critic) pointed out something which made me rethink my point of view; therefore, my discomfort must be your fault, and how dare you point the problems of these texts out?! Why examine the text when we can blame the critic?

There are problematic aspects to the majority of mainstream porn — I think most people will agree to that. Not everyone will feel comfortable viewing porn, period. Not everyone will feel comfortable with their bodies being aroused by something they intellectually dislike or find offensive. Those who dislike and/or are offended by some porn likely have their own reasons for that response. There are likely some women out there who agree with MacKinnon on some level who don’t necessarily identify as radical feminists. There are radical feminists who don’t agree with MacKinnon about porn. And the ones who do agree with MacKinnon spend their energies critiquing the texts, not guilt-tripping women into agreeing with them, as Blue implies.

I’ll agree with Blue that we live in a sexually repressive culture that disallows women access to full sexual autonomy and expression.  However, lumping radical feminists in with Christians — a group of people with much more ideological and political power in the West than radical feminists — in the creation and perpetuation of this culture is disingenuous, dishonest, and really just a low blow. The characterization of radical feminists as sex-haters and misogynists for having the gall to critique porn has really got to stop.

Friends, this is what I have to say: The problems with the world — and with the media we use to represent, comment on, and critique the world — that critics discuss are not the fault of the critics. Don’t blame the critic. Take responsibility for your own thoughts and feelings. If you’re uncomfortable with a text after listening to a critique of that text, push it and see where that leads you. Don’t get pissy with the critic for making you think in a different way about a text you thought you were hunky-dory with.

I don’t want to tell folks not to shoot the messenger, since the saying implies that we feminists are simply reporting back to the masses about The Truth. This is not the case, at least not for me in my particular (postmodern, little-t-truths) perspective. Rather, I think some Billy Joel sums up my point concisely:

We didn't start the fire

]]> http://heartoffalsehood.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/guilt-tripping-and-the-art-of-critique/feed/ 1 heartoffalsehood But we're trying to fight it http://heartoffalsehood.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/meta-talk/ http://heartoffalsehood.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/meta-talk/#comments Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:01:18 +0000 L http://heartoffalsehood.wordpress.com/?p=261 ]]>

So, I’m sorta changing the format of things around here.

As you’ve all likely noticed, I don’t really blog anymore — I just can’t be bothered, I guess. But I still have the urge to share things I read. While it was open, the forum met those needs. Since I shut it down, I’ve tried sharing links to relevant feminist articles on my Facebook, but I don’t want to do that too often for my own and my friends’ sanity. (I shared a link to this excellent LJ post on my Facebook, and had what wound up being a decent conversation with one of my male friends. But it was still stressful to field all the traditional accidental-troll responses he pulled out to the simple idea that men speak up to their friends when they hear those friends say/do rapey things. I don’t think our friendship was ever in any danger, but I don’t relish the thought of having conversations like that every time I want to post something feminist. I can only tolerate such things in small doses.)

So, I created a Twitter account. I’ve also linked to it here on the right side of the blog, under the Blogroll just under the header picture. The goal for my Twitter feed is to share the little tidbits and morsels that come across my computer screen without having to write an entire blog post about them.

You can follow me on Twitter if you also have an account, or you can see what I’m reading by coming to this blog and checking out the Twitter Updates widget.  I’ll probably still post regular blog entries now and again, but I’ve just got to admit how exhasted I am in terms of feminist activism and my regular life (I’m teaching two summer comp classes right now, and my brain has literally turned off, which makes the teaching juuuust a teeny bit difficult. Plus, grading, omg). Tweeting is the most I can muster at the moment. Which is better than nothing!