Sunday, March 15, 2009

Three Links

  • A new radical disability site based in Toronto called If I Can't Dance Is It Still My Revolution. Check out its challenging, realistic, and ambivalent page on being an ally.

  • Another Toronto-based site, this one a blog by "a social worker with an anti-oppressive research and teaching practice... As a white, middle class woman with an elitist degree, I’m always trying to be more aware of my privilege. But I’m also a queer, disabled woman who has been living in some of the poorest areas of Montreal and Toronto". Her site is A Just Society. Check out her post sketching out some basic concepts related to sexual identity, "Queer is a State of Mind".

  • And here is another blog, this one by Penny Red, "a socialist, feminist, deviant, reprobate, queer, addict, literature student, journalist and sometime blogger" based in England. In her post "Identity politics and cyberculture: We're not in Kansas anymore" she reflects on the incessant attacks she experiences as a feminist blogger and on other online attacks on people who experience oppression. She began blogging, she said, when a feminist blogger she admired was chased from the internet by misogynistic abuse: "And I thought: fuck you. Fuck all of you snide little losers and rednecks and toryboys spitting bile at keyboards in your sad little bedrooms. This is my internet too. I want it back."

1 comment:

Chrystal Ocean said...

Have a lot of sympathy for the view expressed in that first link.

The writer nails it when she talks about allies. Wherever they exist (they're SO hard to find), they should assume a supporting role, NOT one of leadership. Yet what Daphne and I call "do-gooders" rarely get it and some, when they do, get their feathers ruffled and take offense.

Not just that, but the message to potential allies that they must follow or support, not lead, has to be constantly hammered home by those among the oppressed minority who are the true leaders... Which can be exhausting on its own.

There's so much else to be concerned about than training one's potential allies. Really, one can end up thinking, Why bother?