Kevin Drum lays out a mea culpa over women in the blogosphere and writes,
if men complain that women spend too much time blogging about “women’s issues” — and I know that some of them do — and if women complain that men spend too little time blogging about women’s issues — and some of them do — we better figure out what we’re talking about. This might be a long settled question in academic circles for all I know
Yes and no. I still vividly recall a graduate seminar I took in which one week we were reading critiques of Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, including Nancy Fraser’s now seminal critique that “the official public sphere rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions,” gender key among them. A number of people in the class made the point that they could agree with Fraser’s argument, but didn’t see what her claims that men tend to interrupt women and speak longer in meetings had to do with the larger public sphere. At which point the professor pointed out (over attempts by students trying to interrupt her) that all of those speaking were men. The class shut up after that and the rest of the period proceeded at a painfully slow pace. Afterward one female student (whom I’m not holding as representative) complained to me that she wished the professor hadn’t done that; she felt put on the spot and felt discussion afterward was artificial in nature.
Now, pretty much all of the male students were lefty, a good number of us queer and feminist in our political identification. But an abstract awareness of gender inequality and asymmetry, useful though that is, does not always or even usually translate into an intuitive knowledge that would facilitate more equitable behavior. Which gets to Fraser’s point: while ideas seem to exist in a realm of their own (I think in one sense they do), their microfoundations are still the social and personal relations we all have to one another.
Shakespeare’s Sister (whom Kevin was responding to) makes another, related point: “I’m willing to discuss it for as long as it takes to convince them that gender politics (including both women’s issues and gay rights issues) are not secondary issues to half their party, and that the idea of anyone calling him- or herself a political blogger who ignores political issues of primacy to large swaths of their party is patently absurd.”
Yet straight men do tend to discuss women’s rights and gay rights issues when posed as policy questions. This last year or three we’ve all been discussing gay rights issues in spades. What gets much less discussion are those personal-is-political concerns that women’s liberation and gay liberation sought to address. The same holds true for racial minorities; civil rights issues are discussed everywhere, often in non-dodgy terms, but what’s lacking are more prominent black and Latino (especially) voices in the anglophone political blogosphere. At least we gays have Andrew Sullivan!
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