Showing posts with label Claire Potter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Claire Potter. Show all posts

December 19, 2011

"But why would anyone — much less a law professor — leave a comment like that up on her blog..."

"To prove that she’s not a wimpy feminist? Got that right, sister!"

If sisterhood were powerful, sister, you might have pointed out that comment to me and asked me if I would delete it, and maybe waited to see if I would take it down — or if I would not, why I would not — before writing a blog post in the Chronicle of Higher Education insulting me for things people have written in my comments that you don't even know whether I've read, which, in fact, I had not.

But I take down things like that when I find out about them, and now that I've taken it down, it can only be read in your blog post.

Sister.

December 16, 2011

"Feminist blogging is definitely not for wimps, which is why the vast majority of us do it pseudonymously."

"The condescension and mansplaining is hard to bear, particularly if you have to deal with a fair amount of this in the meat world."

So writes Claire Potter, which seems not to be a pseudonym, so I guess she's very bold and brave. Who's doing the "condescension and mansplaining," the blogger or the enemies out there who are presumably the reason why feminist blogging is "definitely not for wimps"?

Potter links the word "mansplaining" to the Urban Dictionary:
Mansplain...
to delighting in condescending, inaccurate explanations delivered with rock solid confidence of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation
Up until I got to the word "he," I thought "mansplaining" referred a feminist expounding feminist dogma to an idiot man. It's the other way around. The man is the condescender in this particular portmanteau word. 

So the feminist blogger has the difficult struggle with other people condescendingly explaining things to her. Is there any awareness that she is condescendingly explaining things to other people?

Potter proceeds to enumerate 3 "dangerous topics for the feminist blogger": race, sexual assault, and sports. The dangerousness seems to register in the form of people who simply argue with the feminist blogger. For example, Potter says that when she writes about race, "weirdos" speak up and say... well, she doesn't say what they say, only that "They all seem to think that people who write about race have the same power over other citizens that you would normally attribute to, say, the federal government, a state legislature or the Supreme Court." That's pretty vague, and I'm not sensing what the "danger" is.

Anyway, Potter's blog — published at the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education —  is called "Tenured Radical." Tenured Radical is a delightful phrase to head an essay boasting of one's own courage in the face of adversity.

UPDATE: I respond to Potter's reaction to me.