To facilate activity and interaction, we've added a query. We hope you'll respond. Today's query is taken from Audre Lorde:
"And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives."Does this speak to you? How? What do you remain silent about? When you write or speak, do you seek out a community of women? Does your work or views reflect a feminist or political view?
We want Color Online to be a thriving, active community. How are we doing? Have suggestions or requests? Write us at cora_litgroup@yahoo.com.We look forward to hearing from you
4 comments:
I was discussing this with a friend and fellow blogger recently--Audre urged us to transform silence into "language and action"--but is blogging active? Or passive? There's something quite safe about blogging, yet also potentially radical...I'm not sure yet how 21st-century technology will impact feminist thought & action. I've never believed you have to march and boycott to "prove" you're a feminist, but what happens if we all stay in the comfort of our homes, typing sweet, sensitive posts on our respective blogs? I'm still trying to find the right action for me...teaching? Writing? Filmmaking? I suspect it will have to be a combination of several different forms of expression. And I don't mean to diminish the potential of blogs to create community; the question is, what next?
Zetta,
I don't there is anything passive about committing your thoughts to print and publicly exposing your ideas and opinions, even if you are protected from evil glares.
As someone who has frequently stirred the pot and has been online for more than a decade, I firmly believe writing is action.
Do we believe words have power? I do. The blog is a potentially powerful medium. I think technology and this medium has the potential to to profoundly impact feminist thought and action. But the blog is still in its infancy and many of us who write in this space are still learning and growing.
Like technology significantly facilitated a political ground swell and action in this country, so, too, shall we writers in the blogosphere reach, connect and affect.
Me, I'm on a mission to inspire, incite, inform and educate. If you need lessons on how to be the bull in the china store, holla. It seems to come to me naturally. lol
Great conversation. I'm not sure if I would consider my online writing to have a feminist or political view, but I do know that I began blogging to find others who share my particular interests and ways of thinking (which doesn't mean always agreeing, necessarily). I'm also someone who is more comfortable expressing myself through writing, so blogging helps my self-confidence, particularly when I get feedback from others.
What I find to be true - not only as a woman of color, but as a teacher - is that what most people crave is engagement. To quote Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, "All about us is noise." We don't listen to one another, we don't look each other in the eye, we don't have the time or patience to respond meaningfully. So the quote from Audre Lorde is especially profound in that regard, because all she asks us to do is "seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them" - which in this day and age, can be quite revolutionary. Or at least I hope so.
Yesterday I read a related, though very different, conversation about blogging on the Horn Book blog (Read Roger, http://hbook.com/blog/index.html)--mostly authors were wondering if they *had* to blog as a way of creating an online presence to promote their persona and work. Some referred to blogging as "navel-gazing and back-slapping" in that some folks really have nothing new to say: they report what they had for lunch, what they did over the weekend, and then the commenters are merely friends and fellow authors who validate the blogger and make him/her feel like there is an audience paying attention. I think blogs can have radical content and an impact, but there's still a distance between the blogger and the "real world"...I think of the important correspondence between 19th century black women activists--those letters mattered, but those women were also out in the world, stirring things up--and they saw one another on the lecture circuit or at rallies, etc. (Is anyone going to the Black Women in the Ivory Tower conference at Rutgers?) Blogging creates a kind of community, but isn't it also--at times--preaching to the choir? How do we engage those who oppose our values, along with those who agree?
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