[In March, I was invited to participate in Kickaction.ca's blogging carnival, on the topic of "women, art and technology. Here is what I wrote, which appeared on Kickaction in the last week of March.]

A few months ago, I was sitting at The Main, eating potato latkes at a time when I should’ve been in bed instead. The night wound down as I discussed my tentative idea about how great it would be to have a weekly Q&A with women artists with my late-night dining companion. Fortunately for me, she also happened to be a pretty good poet, and so the “Women In Art” series for Kickaction was born.

I wasn’t sure how long the series could last, or how many women artists I could find. But each woman artist I talked to was generous enough to provide me with names of other women writers/ musicians/artists/filmmakers. Four months later, the series is still going strong. Running the series taught me the obvious fact that there are so many talented women artists who don’t get enough press. It also reinforced my belief that there is no singular “version” of a woman artist – each woman’s art and vision is unique. My ultimate goal for the series is to show the diversity of women artists out there, while also engaging future women artists in a meaningful conversation. This also mirrors my belief that logging and feminism go hand-in-hand, in the way that both are versatile concepts that encourage plurality and conversation.

To me, feminism is not about imposing an enforced “sisterhood” about one unified cause. Doing so would be to erase the diversity of experiences and backgrounds in women. I find more and more nostalgia about second-wave feminism, and how “unified” and focused it was. Of course, that was possible due to the fact that much of second-wave feminism was restricted to the singular identity of a middle-class, white, cisgendered and heterosexual woman. While I may share the heterosexuality and the middle-class background of second-wave feminists, my non-white status also means I have different concerns when it comes to my politics. Other feminists also have different set of priorities than I do, as they may be queer, trans, and come from different class and cultural backgrounds than mine.

With increasing pressure to capture the viewer or the reader’s attention in this world of information overload, the mainstream media can only represent the complex and intersectional feminist identities in simplistic ways that fit into a soundbite. But blogging doesn’t have to. The feminist bloggers I know and read debate, discuss, and disagree with each other on a variety of issues. Blogging also encourages reader participation and collaboration in a way that newspapers or television do not, where the public has the potential to reshape the discussion. Feminist and anti-racist blogs like Racialicious, Feministing, Bitch Blogs, and Colorlines cover news items and topics that are often ignored in the mainstream media. It was through Colorlines and Racialicious that I found frank discussion on sex lives of women of colour (Racialicious’ “Love, Anonymously” series), as well as living as a plus-sizd woman (Bitch Blog’s “Sex and the Fat Girl” series), or thoughtful analyses of popular cultural symbols that promote white supremacy, heteronormativity and passivity for women. It is through these blogs that I learned how to apply the theoretical knowledge of my feminist education in real life.

Of course, blogging has its challenges too. It can become competitive and degenerate into a
high school-like popularity contest in its race to gain more followers and comments. Sometimes,
disagreements can turn into downright ugly fights. In one rather infamous in the blogosphere,
when Megan Carpentier of Jezebel, when she criticized the Guardian article “I’m not a feminist (and there is no but)” by Renee Martin of Womanist Musings, the comments quickly became a blame game without critically engaging in the heavily white bias of mainstream feminism (which was the point of Martin’s piece in the first place).

There is still the dicey subject of blogging largely being a labour of love. Although some bloggers have successfully turned their blogging into a business, these are usually apolitical – a.k.a. “lifestyle” – bloggers. It’s damn hard to make a living as a writer in the first place, and trying to make a living being a feminist/anti-racist blogger is still fairly impossible, unless you hold a day job. This also raises the question of whether blogs can have a real, measurable impact, or how voices of dissent in the blogosphere can transform themselves into real political change. I’m not raising these concerns because I have real answers, but because I believe they are important concerns for feminist bloggers to keep in mind.

So what’s next for feminist bloggers? How can feminist blogs secure the support – emotional and financial – they need? Should feminist blogging be more professionalized? Let me know what you think.

[image from Gender Focus]