she's dressed for the H-bomb

Read Brownfemipower's post on Oaxaca and check the comment thread for Spanish language form letters you can send to the Mexican consulate in your area (for New Yorkers: 27 E 39th St, New York, NY 10016) or any of the Mexican government officials BFP lists. Be sure, also, to watch the videos she links to.

What I want to emphasize is BFP's understanding that feminism, being a critique of power, contains multitudes in terms of scholarship, activism, and resistance. I won't try to claim that discussions about women's appearance and sexual autonomy are trivial - they're not. But they certainly seem to generate more heated, interminable arguments among feminist bloggers than topics such as, say, the subjugation of indigenous populations in Mexico. The predominance of white middle-class feminists in the online community (and in the broader conversation) facilitates the popularization and wider visibility of a certain inflection of feminism, which needs to be adjudicated if we're going to claim to represent more than the most privileged among us.

I balk at appearing to validate the "there are more worthwhile things to talk about" line, but I think the appearance discourse is so prevalent in the feminist blogosphere for a couple of reasons: a) online communities always over-represent a demographic that already has access to the material resources that sustain an Interllectual, ie a computer, a high speed connection, leisure time, higher education, the bourgeois luxury of considering "conventionally feminine" attire optional, etc., and b) discussions about appearance can be *done* entirely online. All you need are words and images, two things the Internet has in spades; there are no cyber-reality/real-reality conundrums over how to mobilize, over GotV campaigns, letter-writing, picketing, civil disobedience - certainly there's no expectation of placing your body in the literal line of fire as the logical extension of your advocacy. Basically, yes, it's easy. Necessary, but clearly less taxing than facing an army of truncheons. Twisty, for example, talks a lot about activism, but almost always as a litotic justification for her contemning some women's girly looks as "not what feminism is really about" - meanwhile, she seems to devote a hell of a lot of attention to analyzing sexist fashion spreads.

And I do think that particular analysis is important as well. But, to misquote Ms. Faster, it's not what feminism is *exclusively* about; simply leading an examined life isn't sufficient in a globalized world. If feminism were just about evaluating oneself by a sanctioned set of moral standards, it would be a brand of fundamentalism, rather than a fulcrum of change. The online feminist community needs to be more serious about community-building, about finding ways of bringing into the conversation those people who've been doubly disenfranchised (by the dominant ideology, and the progressive blogosphere). I'm not presuming to pass judgment on anybody who's never been in the blast radius of a tear gas bomb (my own experience with protest has been comparatively irenic), but it's time we utilized this big, brilliant series of tubes to create a more substantive movement, one that's not bogged down in internecine bickering and self-reflexivity. Let's not let insider conflicts stultify our purpose - to broaden the movement, to be inclusive of as many groups as there are people who need feminism (meaning everyone), and to ensure that every online practitioner of feminist criticism is engaged in praxis on the ground as well.

Of course, my own blog's ultimate irrelevance in the larger world of critical thought means this post will accomplish precisely bupkis. (In the words of Principal Skinner: Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong!)