I hate when alternate media folks create stupid words for conflict like “Amandagate,” but there it is.
If you’re short on time, the condensed version of my final judgment on “Amandagate” is in bold at the end.
I weighed in on the controversy towards the end of a monster thread at Twisty’s where no one will likely read it since they are pissed off at my stance on invoking sexist symbols within a feminist context, but this is my take on the whole deal:
I don’t think Amanda is off the hook with BrownFemiPower, but not necessarily for the same reasons a lot of other people are expressing.
Amanda is a prominent feminist largely because she is relatively young, white, and has the approval of white men, who make up a substantial portion of her base. Though I’m sure her fans are diverse, she couldn’t have made it to where she is without the presence of all those white men legitimizing her. I realized once that she has their approval because they can get on board with her feminism, as long as it’s mainly about abortion issues (since female entrapment sucks), and because it elevates their porn to freedom-fighting status. Basically, the white dudes’ maturity level is “Fuck women! But I’m still better than conservatives because I’m a morally superior egalitarian, right?” Marcotte has plenty of feminist integrity, but goes out of her way to placate them so they won’t dislike her; she’ll say things that will be unpopular with them to a degree, but only to that degree–never anything that would make her too unpopular with her white male readership. Her career hinges upon it.
As other people pointed out, women of color are rightfully angry about why she is the one getting the book deals at all, and this incident can act as a foundation for a discussion, though I’m distressed that so many women of color already bowed out altogether (I can’t imagine a feminist world without JusticeWalks in it, trying to fix it). I doubt Marcotte cribbed BrownFemiPower directly. But I don’t think she’s off the hook anyway.
In the dark ages before we had the technology for mass communication, great thinkers independently arrived at the same conclusions all the time, in obvious isolation. With the advent of the intraweb, we have greater access to the latest information and any citation we need, but when that door opens, we have an exponential increase in the number of voices with their own musings. It’s easy to cite popularized ideas that have been formally published, but among the blog world, the possibility that someone has come to the same conclusion that you did first are seemingly endless. Even so, Amanda is still not off the hook with BrownFemiPower.
Amanda was acutely aware of the long history of feminist work being co-opted by white women, and white women’s concerns marginalizing those of women of color within the movement. We would deem her racist if she didn’t include the issues of women of color. Assuming she wove new ideas out of the material she gleaned from the work of people of color at the ACLU conference, which I believe is the most likely scenario, she should have at least cited those sources as the springboard for her original ideas. But she’s still not off the hook with BrownFemiPower.
The question is: why is it, when white feminists are pressed to be more inclusive of women of color’s issues, does it seem to be a last minute cram session to pay lip service in the book like the good white feminist she knows she is supposed to be? Why wasn’t she a consistent, consummate reader of WoC blogs? She should have already been familiar with the conclusions women of color have drawn from the work they do, rather than familiarizing herself with the race/sex intersection as an afterthought to cover her hide. I think BrownFemiPower is (was) one of the biggest WoC blogs. If Marcotte’s angle wasn’t the one I describe, she would have already known to give credit to BFP, or at least mention her for echoing her same conclusion.
Tags: Amanda Marcotte, BrownFemiPower, JusticeWalks, marginalization, pomos, racist feminism, white supremacy
