Entries tagged with year of fail

Cosigned: Meloukhia's Open Letter to Feministing

Feministing is a very large feminist group blog, which I've never followed. I didn't have enough online time, then I found that the site didn't load properly in Firefox 2. By the time I upgraded to Firefox 3, I'd got the impression that they were part of the mainstream white middle-class feminism that claims to lead the movement while neglecting intersectional issues and failing to credit other people's work, as critiqued by women of colour (see ABW's On Feminism series). Recent events have not changed that impression; see also Narcissist Feminism as described by Jennifer Kesler.

There's a new group objecting to being treated dismissively by the Feministing crew, and to the commenting culture there, except that it's not new at all. Disabled women have been calling out ableism on the site for some time, and being ignored. Meloukhia's Open Letter is not so much a response to a particular event as a "last straw" situation. Disabled feminists have had enough, and they're not going to take it any more! Anybody is welcome to cosign, either on the open letter post or elsewhere (with a link on Meloukhia's post so she can keep track).

Linkspams are being collected at

access_fandom.

It's just like the Everready bunny, isn't it? Now we come back to cultural appropriation, from a different direction.

I've got a rotten cold and don't feel up to a detailed argument, so have an outline:

1: Oh, for crying out loud.

2: Original slash is, to a first approximation, written by and for women. Many - the majority, I believe - of the authors are het cis women. The stories are romance, erotica, or both.

Slash has the potential to be subversive, but my mostly-secondhand impression is that it usually isn't.

3: Gay fiction, as it was called in my day (LGBT is what the Lambda Literary Foundation are calling it; other acronyms are available), can be any genre. Its defining characteristic is featuring characters of minority sexuality and/or minority gender, from the viewpoint of someone who knows what they're talking about, unlike the stereotypes we're usually confronted with in the mainstream media.

LGBT fiction might just be written as a romance, detective story, western, SF story etc. with a protagonist the author can relate to, but promoting it as LGBT fiction is inherently political.

4: 2 and 3 are not the same thing.

If slash writers want to win awards, they should roll their own.

In the first post I read about this, Willow disproved a well-meaning but unfounded argument.

likespring calls out some of the nasty things being said (includes quotations of racism and general cluelessness; I'm using it as a guide to what not to read in the linkspam)

linkspam masterpost

If it isn't one thing, it's another

Year of Fail continues