Tuesday 4 January 2011

New Quote

You may have noticed that the quote at the top of this blog had changed. We have replaced "I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist" with "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people".

We had an e-mail from a reader who saw our previous quote as being a statement about mascochism as a sexual practice/preference/desire. We agreed that that wasn't a message that we wanted to send to readers.

While I didn't understand the quote in the same way as our reader, I do prefer this quote. I don't think the choices are to fight oppression or to enjoy it. I think the options for women are much more complicated than that, and resistance is often much more about hope than suffering. In contrast, I love the many different ways you can understand 'the radical notion women are people.'

Anyway I thought this would be a good opportunity to gather reader feedback. Are there things that make the hand mirror welcoming or unwelcoming? Accessible or inaccessible?

12 comments:

anna caro said...

I like the new one better too :)

My only bugbear is that I hate hate hate truncated RSS feeds. Having to click through to every post from google reader has led me to stop following a few blogs, and whilst I'm sticking with this one I'd love it if you changed it.

Chally said...

Seconding anna caro.

Lee Clark said...

I like the new one - the other one seemed to shout a notion of presupposed 'victimhood' about being female.

Adele said...

Teenaa koutou,

I have to ask what does it actually mean to say "women are people"?

People the world over suffer poverty, pestilence and disease, discrimination, marginalisation, racism, cultural, ethnic and physical genocide etc etc etc.

From a Te Ao Taangata Whenua perspective Waahine are 'he whare taangata' the house of humankind, because without women, the rest of human civilisation wouldn't exist.

Hollie said...

I really love the new quote too (even if it sits a little funny below the title).
I was wondering if you would be able to say where/who it was from? I remember coming across it a while ago and thinking that was incredibly powerful in its simplicity.

Boganette said...

What's up with all the links to stupid blogs on this page? Are those links randomly generated? What's the deal?

Maia said...

Thanks for the feedback of the feed issue. We're discussing it now.

Adele - One of the reasons that I like this quote is that it is open to interpretation. For example, yes people are oppressed all around the world. I would say that 'the radical notion that women are people' means that feminists must see the interrelation between these systems of oppression - that women's liberation is impossible in isolation.

Monkey Boy - That reminds me that I want to write a post about how much it annoys me when people pathologise victims. Feminism is about the way women is oppresssed, and there's no shame in being a victim of patriarchy.

Hollie - I couldn't make the formatting sit right - I'm no designer. I was going to include the reference, but that looked even funnier - I'll have a play around to see if I can make it work when I get the time. It's usually credited to Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler and I think it comes from here.

Deborah said...

@Boganette - are you still seeing lots of links? And is anyone else?

Maia said...

I can still see the links Deborah.

I think what happens is that blogger lists posts that link to this post. The idea that this promotes debate.

But snazzy blog rolls which show not just the blog, but the last post made on that blog and are located on individual post pages, break this feature. There ends up being links to most/every blog from all the blogs that use that feature (like we do).

Possibly the best thing to do is declare the feature broken and get rid of the list of posts that link to each post (which I htink is possible)

I'm sure that's all clear as mud.

Tamara said...

Hi there. I love your blog but I find that it always takes ages to load, compared to every other blog or website I go to. This happens on every computer I use and on IE as well as Firefox. Does anyone else have this problem?

DJames said...

I like the new quote, mainly because it doesn't seperate people into different labels.

Maia said...

Just letting people know that the feed should no longer be truncated. I switched it over today. Let me know if you're still seeing truncated posts.