I talk long time. July 13, 2008

I suppose this marks the beginning of my venture into the public blogosphere. I’ve been sitting on this idea for ages but I’ve decided to start now, right this minute, on a Sunday night, before I squashed the entire idea with my butt.

I don’t know if there’s a reason other than pure selfishness. I want to improve my writing and editing skills, which can only come with practice, and I want to write about things that are on my mind. I do have a personal online journal but it has deteriorated over the years into a festival of “OMG” and “LOL” and “WTF” and “AAAARGH” which is probably because only a select few can read it. I’ll try to keep that to a minimum here for my own sake.

I anticipate I’ll be writing a lot about anti-oppression, namely an intersectional feminist perspective. Oh, oh, I used the word ‘intersectional.’ I am a Women & Gender Studies student. I am constantly trying to limit the jargon I learned in school when talking about anti-oppression (although, I think intersectional is not necessarily a term limited to academia).

This is a big part of why I wanted to start a blog. I don’t have many spaces in which I can talk about the things that affect me as a queer woman of colour. Often I have to pick and choose which of my identities is more relevant if I want to talk about it and if I want to be heard. “I can only hear you if you talk about your gender”, “I can only hear you if you talk about your sexuality”, and so on.

I don’t believe in a feminism that ignores race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, gender identity, religion, ethnicity, and all of the things that make us who we are and have real, material effects on how we experience the world. I don’t believe in a feminism that one type of oppression must take the backseat so we can get the ‘main ones’ out of the way. I don’t believe in a feminism that assumes it is independent from upholding unequal power relations and is immune from criticism. I don’t believe in wiping away variation to reach a goal. I don’t believe that calling yourself a ‘feminist’, ‘activist’, ‘liberal’, ‘communist’ or anything that indicates a dedication to anti-oppression actually absolves you from the world we live in. I certainly don’t believe that there is one way to be a feminist or an activist.

I am very aware that having regular access to Internet is a class privilege, and many times women are subtly or blatantly rejected from feminist discussions both online and offline because they haven’t had the privilege of time to read Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, or any other big name feminist works. What I mean to say is that even though I am working class, I do have a university education that allows me a certain amount of social mobility and it will reflect in everything I write. My access to Internet allows me to blog, and allows me to read a frillion blogs a day. We all hold positions of privilege and disadvantage. It took me quite a long time to realize that, and I am still realizing it to this day all the ways in which I benefit off the backs of other people.

The point I’m trying to work around in my head here is that even though I am oppressed in some ways, I am privileged in certain ways and I need to be aware of this when I am doing activist work. I know what it feels like to be told to wait for the white women to get their rights and then we’ll talk about you, or that I am asking for too much. I need to be vigilant about this when I’m writing in this blog.