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Blogging Against Disablism Day: How I bought a bike

May 2, 2011 Liz

This weekend I bought a folding bike. I’m still using my wheelchair sometimes, and cane or crutches most of the time. When I tried Danny’s bike, I found out that as long as my knee behaves, riding a bike is easier than walking, and certainly hurts less. So it seems like time to step up my rehab efforts — from walking around the warm pool to biking! Plus, folding bikes are just cool. For Blogging Against Disablism Day I want to write about buying the bike, and how it feels to be getting stronger physically, but being in between.

I went to Warm Planet near the Caltrain station in San Francisco where they seemed to have a big selection of folding bikes. They got out some Dahon bikes for me to try. I really appreciated that they didn’t act weird that I came into the store on crutches and went out on two wheels. “Go right, then two blocks down and you’ll come to the bridge across the creek”. I was only going to circle around the little plaza but the guys in the shop encouraged me to go further. No one acted funny about my crutches.

I rode off feeling completely terrified despite my bravado. I didn’t take my backpack with folding canes in it. Off into the city — alone! Away from my car, and my wheelchair, and crutches. Only my phone to help me somehow if I got stuck. Well, it’s been years. I got off the bike and adjusted the seat, then wobbled off down the sidewalk. As I rounded the corner and looked ahead, paused and waited for the light to change, I started crying like crazy. I realized how incredibly and beautifully invisible I was.

I love my wheelchair! It’s lightweight, it’s elegant and lovely, I have great joy in moments of going downhill or around corners and spinning, and best of all it gets me around. I keep the raggedy old gate tags from airplane flights on the chair frame where I can look down and see them any time, to remind me that the chair helps give me freedom and independence to go anywhere. Well, anywhere that laws attempt to force airlines to let me and my painful unreliable limping legs and my wheelchair on the airplane and anywhere my massive privilege and credit card pay for me to go.

It seems very unfair that a bike – just another metal device with wheels and tires – should mean something so different than a wheelchair. They’re on a sort of continuum! Or a graph with cars and couches and rolly office chairs! They’re just things that we use with our bodies! Why is everything so screwed up? Why are people such jerks? Why did Ruben Gallego spend ages in a Soviet nursing home and his friends die there when they should have been flying down the street, seeing everything and going everywhere, when people literally fly across the sky, and force others to be imprisoned by the structures we build and the ones we don’t build! Why is my friend Nick stuck without reliable home care barely able to go out at all (and “lucky” to have fought like hell to get out of being institutionalized) mired down in so many levels of bureaucracy it takes a whole team of people to dig out from under it? What will happen to my friends and family and to us all because of this ignorance and bigotry?

As I cried while flying down the street on this folding bike, I fell in love with it. I felt embarrassed for how I felt and hoped no one could tell, that the dudes in the store couldn’t tell and wouldn’t be thinking that I was having a sentimental or intense experience; I certainly wanted to hide that out of some mixture of anger at how other people let me know what they think I experience. Part of what I felt was really complicated sadness and anger and relief at realizing how *marked* I am when I’m visibly disabled, because I suddenly didn’t feel it any more, though I felt exactly the same in mind and body. That was unexpected. Part of it was like a little betrayal. I was *too glad*. I misplaced a bit of armor that I still need.

The road looked different. Distances shortened. I constructed a new map of here to there. Got out my phone, turned on My Tracks, and recorded where I was going.

I looked at a gravelly path and it wasn’t a barrier, all of a sudden. I could go down it, and wouldn’t be just stuck in the gravel. Crossing the street wasn’t a painful exhausting process of wheeling over cracks and bumps and gutters, bad curb cuts and the difficult crown in the middle. The roads all opened up. Completely surreal. Time and space folded. If you’ve experienced this shift of distance and effort, you should think of it as actual hyperspace. Your doors of perception get another doorway added on to the Winchester Mystery House of your brain and body.

At this point I was getting to be afraid again, not sure how far I could go. My bad knee hurt, and my not-so-bad knee hurt too. My calf and foot were basically freaking out and spasming so that I wanted to punch myself in the leg to make it stop. I got off the bike and sat on the bar that goes across from seat to handlebars, balancing and trying to rest and massage around my knee, staring at the 3rd street houseboats. Would I even be able to walk the half block to my car once I got back? What if I misjudged it all terribly? I turned around.

Rehab is difficult and slow. I’ve done it before. It took me from 1996 to 2000 to stop using a cane to walk and even then, I still ended up on crutches a couple of times a year. Seems like I should already know how to handle it emotionally, but it turns out not to be that easy. I swear I’m not complaining! I appreciate my good luck in this. I’m just saying it messes with my head.

I was waking up in a cold sweat lately wondering about my parking placard, which said “Expires June 2011” on it. I pictured going back to the DMV, and my doctor, and the DMV again to renew it. What if my doctor wouldn’t renew it? If she wouldn’t, then that was going to limit where I could go and what plans I could make for a long time to come. But would she think I was “disabled enough” or should be better faster? How would I explain? I cried when the renewed placard came automatically in the mail.

I’m on this cusp where, my hands and one arm are messsed up now too, and I can’t push myself very well in the wheelchair for long distances and am like, okay, I’m at this point where easily I could go for a powerchair just to get around, if my knees don’t get better. I’m not sure if my walking more is actually improving anything or just damaging myself more. I get through a day walking, but end up crying and desperate for painkillers.

At this point, I think I’m on my way to having more time walking, maybe walking without a cane. For a little while. I’m not sure of it. I can’t picture that it would last. I’d like to walk around San Francisco again and have that secret feeling where I go up a flight of stairs without visible effort and think “HA! My legs just did this THING! And no one KNOWS!” I remember classes at San Francisco State as being continual astonishment like I was whirling around in a sort of Escher drawing of stairs and endless corridors that miraculously, I could handle.

As I rode back to the shop I realized that now I could park further away. I could plan on going to a friend’s house in the city, and park blocks away and ride my folding bike to their door. What else? How far could I go? How far would I dare try to go? Can I even *think* that without making myself want to puke, as if caught in some horrible “inspirational” story!? I refuse to be in one, because I’m in pain and I’m politically conscious and I’m fucking pissed off!

Back at the bike shop. I pulled myself together and hoped it wasn’t obvious I had cried all over. I felt completely drained of energy. The bike shop dudes chatted and asked me questions and adjusted the bike for me. I bought it. I said how I had expected them to throw an attitude about the crutches and explained that I still use my wheelchair.

They then told me all sorts of stories of people using bikes for mobility devices, getting them certified, going on caltrain riding the lift because of not being able to carry it up the steps. One guy said he was unable to straighten his knee to walk well, but could ride his bike fine since it didn’t have to straighten. They began talking in a kind of visionary way about how more people who walk with difficulty could and should use bikes. I complimented them on their integration of the social model of disability. Maybe it was because of bicyclists’ radical politics? Are bike people not like general sports people? They’re like sports people who went through special consciousness raising? Why is it, really, that bike shops will fix a wheelchair, tighten my spokes, check alignment, give advice, without a lot of mystery and mystification, while wheelchair stores automatically act to take away disabled people’s power and act like the sleaziest sort of car sales con-men?

The Warm Planet guy shrugged. “We fit these machines to work with people’s bodies. And everybody’s body is different, that’s all.”

That seems very wise!

I’m going to have some more rehab time, I’ll screw up, exhaust myself, re-injure myself, lose some independence and gain it back, embarrass myself, not be able to live up to other people’s expectations, be an inconvenience, need to be rescued, cry on staircases, get stronger or sicker, but seems likely I get some more walking years out of this body. Things will get easier and easier. Obstacles will start to melt away for me, but they’ll still be there, I’ll still see them. I won’t lose my map of the world. I’ll keep my dual or multiple consciousness. It was hard to get. A lot harder than making my zombie leg move forward over and over. Everybody’s body is different and our bodies change over time in all sorts of ways, cyclically or not. We’ll fit the machines of the world to our bodies… that’s all…

Honoring Joanna Russ

April 29, 2011 Liz

Joanna Russ died today. I’m very sad. I didn’t know her personally but she was one of my feminist heroes, and I wrote back and forth with her a few times about her work. Now I wish I’d said more, written and sent the letter I was writing to her in my head these last few weeks… I had the envelope already addressed with a tiny book inside, waiting for the letter. Instead, I’m writing about her death.

I don’t know what to say. She was so important to me as a writer. I grew up reading tons of science fiction, history, literature, and poetry. When I was a teenager, I had a huge feminist awakening that most of what I read was by men, and that that wasn’t because men were just better writers. I began to go to the effort to look for women’s writing and their histories, in anthologies, in indexes of reference books, in bookstores, and when I got to college, picking classes based on the reading list gender breakdown. It was in my first year of college at University of Texas at a co-op overflow book sale where I saw a stack of Russ’s book How to Suppress Women’s Writing. I read most of it on the floor of the bookstore and then bought several copies for a dollar each and gave them away to people. I bought it for years whenever I saw it in bookstores (to give to people) and seems like I always had a few copies floating around my bookshelves. I read all her other work that I could find and was blown away by The Female Man and We Who Are About To…. Once I got to WisCon, and then even better once there were online bookstores, I read all of her work. I highly recommend What Are We Fighting For? as a thoughtful exploration of feminism and feminist practice.

But it’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing that means the most to me. Back when I was 17, a writer and already deep into researching and cataloguing women writers who I felt were neglected by history and literary criticism, it was absolutely life changing to come across this book that outlined *patterns*. Russ gave the methods of suppressing women names. She made them easy to recognize and name. That’s so important! From that point on I had a useful intellectual framework, a helpful bullshit-detector, that helped me identify bullshit as applied to cultural production in general. It helped my own identity, because I could detect the suppression techniques applied to myself and my work, and could better resist them. And it helped me to know how important it is to focus on, and support, other women, and to be in solidarity with them and with others in groups being suppressed by what I think of as intellectual violence, by underhanded, dishonest means. I felt like the need for choice and action, for active search, for being analytical and careful about my information feeds, what I chose to research as a scholar — so much of that stemmed from Russ’s little book. I’m so grateful for all her work, especially her funny, perturbing, weird science fiction — but I love How to Suppress Women’s Writing dearly for how it helped me when I was a young and angry woman. I built on that book and on Dale Spender’s work in writing my anthology of Spanish-American women poets from the turn of the century. And its central points motivated me to collaborate with Laura Quilter, archivist of the Feminist SF Wiki, kick-ass wikipedia editor, and really, another one of the feminist scholars who I deeply admire, with our friendship one of the mainstays of my life.

When Joanna conferenced in to WisCon, for an interview with Samuel Delany, I transcribed the interview along with Laura . We sat there feeling so emotional and I think grateful, and for me at least, I felt sad that Russ had sort of retired from the fray, but glad that she could, and happy that she sounded so happy. I am wildly enthusiastic and passionate about many things but am often in pain and exhausted and fighting to get through the day, so I feel like I understand more and more that that is just one thing that happens and probably is in my own future. I am sorry if that sounds weird or isn’t well expressed. What I mean is that I think that the expectations of all of us who love and admire her might have been a bit of a burden — when is your next book! answer your fan mail! why aren’t you writing something else! — And I am glad she put down that burden at some point and was able to enjoy the sky and reading and watching Buffy, her friends and family, and kind of kicking back. It felt like a good thing to incorporate into one’s feminism. That we can respect each others’ lives or spaces and things are not all about productivity, work, writing, fighting — what are we fighting for? The right for us all not to have to fight, really. So while I’m sorry she was ill and had chronic fatigue and other problems I’m glad she had the space just to live. I hope that makes sense.

I wrote to Joanna to ask her to copyleft How to Suppress, and let me keep it in print and put it online for free, so that it wouldn’t be disappeared out of history and young people’s serendipitous discoveries — and would be online and easily bookmarkable for feminist bloggers to use as a touchtone. She seemed to like the idea and put me in touch with her agent, but nothing ever came of it. If not me, I hope someone else will be able to keep it in print in a low cost edition, maybe Aqueduct Press or someone else who will give it the care it deserves. But I loved it that she was kind enough to write me letters and postcards and stay in touch.

It helps to read other people’s thoughts on her and how her work was important to them — I was comforted a little (but sadder) reading the long thread on metafilter today.

I know a lot of people i know are devastated by her death, when I think about it, I am middle aged now and am watching the people I grew up admiring, my heroes, grow old and die. I’m sad for us all…

Bad invention: The Sockerchief!

April 26, 2011 Liz

Imagine you have to blow your nose. You don’t have any pockets and no tissues are handy. But wait! You’re wearing your Sockerchiefs!

Sockerchiefs, the latest in my line of horrible and pointless inventions, would be a handkerchief attached to your sock with velcro.

Reach down, rip off the top half of your socks, and blow your nose. Then simply re-attach the hankie to the Sockerchief.

This is possibly even more disgusting than the Beer Hat Neti Pot! It’s extra cringe-worthy since no one would want velcro on their handkerchief. And since it’s easy enough to tuck your handkerchief into the top of your sock if you don’t have pockets (along with your money and ID) it’s also quite pointless. But I’m recording all my bad inventions because I’m still bitter about predicting the cat-ear hat trend back in 1993 or so and then failing to make millons of dollars when people started wearing animal ear hats for real. 20 years from now when the Sockerchief or Cat Egg industrial empire rules the world I can at least point here and say “I told you so”.

A new tiny book from Burn This Press

April 23, 2011 Liz

Thanks to Your Printer at Mission and Cesar Chavez and the folding-and-stapling efforts of my fabulous interns, the new tiny book from Burn This Press is done. It’s my translation of a poem called “Mala piel”, Bad skin, and is by Chilean poet Carmen Berenguer.

A few other poems of hers that I translated years ago were supposed to appear in Five Fingers Review, but after many delays, the journal folded before being able to print that issue. Some of them will be coming out soon in the next issue of Specs – including the awesome poem about the Chilean flag with difficult typography that makes the poem look like the flag. It’s a complicatedly gendered, visceral stance, or experience, of national identity under oppression.

I had to reprint the book and its covers, as I had a page order error in the first batch, and couldn’t stand the light green covers, and the first printer put the rough side of the cover facing inwards instead of putting the textured roughness on the outside. So I went back to Kelly Paper, a fantastic paper store, and got a supply of interesting cover stock for the next few books, going with a warm brown “Kraft” cardstock and paper with tiny random flecks.

Part of the point of my tiny book design was setting it up so I can print copies anytime at home from my laser printer. But once I realized I needed at least 250 copies, it seemed best to go with a copy shop, bringing my own paper.

So anyway, I went to pick up my fabulous Intern, Ellie, from high school and had to chase her down with text messages. She demanded to be taken to the drugstore to meet her “husband” who was going to mock-propose to her with Ring-Pops but I counter-proposed that we go immediately to my cafe haunt, The Grind, get some coffee and start working on assembling the books, and the Ring-Pop Bearer could meet us there. I had all my prints and supplies in two cardboard boxes — aside from the paper, I have a little kit with saddle stapler, bone folder, extra staples, tape, stickers, return address labels, pens, and scissors. I especially love bone folders because they feel so slippery and solid and strong, and it’s neat to think it’s a special tool. My mistake was in not having more than one bone folder. I wore out my thumbnail doing creases! Ellie’s friend then turned up with the ringpops and a half gallon of Rocky Road ice cream, wearing a Hello Kitty hat with built-in pigtails.

After he proposed, I informed him that he was hired. We ate the ice cream and folded books for the next couple of hours and had a great time gossiping. I told them they might not want to read the poem because it was “inappropriate” which is what the kids say when they want to describe the generation over them being embarrassing.

It was an especially nice way for a book to come into the world. Thanks very much to Ellie and Ubaldo for the help and entertainment!

Fundraiser for the girl in Cleveland, Texas

April 13, 2011 Liz

Thank you to Sylvia Gonzalez of Houston, Vice President of the Southwest chapter of LULAC, who organized the effort to get money directly to the family of the 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas who was gang raped a few months ago and then basically got slut-shamed by her entire town and the New York Times. This post has information and links about the situation: How to help the 11 year old girl in Texas.

In the comments on my original post you can see several organizations local to this girl and her family, and you might like to donate to them to support the local infrastructure. I donated to several of them, including Bridgehaven, the Montgomery Women’s Center, and New Horizons Family Center. While I respect those organizations and think they’re important, I also think it’s important to get money directly to people in crisis. The girl’s family had to move, her mom has serious health problems, her dad was out of work for months, and I’m sure they can use all the avenues of help that are possible.

You can mail a check made out to the Cleveland Crime Victim Family directly to Sylvia (10102 Elm Knoll Trail, Houston, Texas, 77064), deposit it into any Amegy Bank. If you donate using the Chipin fund I set up here, I’ll collect that money and mail Sylvia a check next week. Any Paypal fees that get charged I will make up as my extra donation. If you want to leave a note for the family here, or email it to me privately (lizhenry@gmail.com) I’ll include those notes when I send Sylvia the check.

The story and the stories and comments that came out of it were so horrific, I needed to do something directly, so as not to feel so despairing. It was tremendously heartening to read all the comments on my first post, and I swore to follow up, so that people would have a way to contribute and respond further. When I raised money for Katrina disaster relief and flew out to the Astrodome, I ended up using that money — a couple of thousand dollars in cash — to people at moments when it made a big difference in their lives. I saw it work and have also appreciated getting no strings attached money to help me through crises in my own life. I think there is also something powerful about knowing that an individual person, even a stranger, has the faith in you to help out on that level. Thanks for reading, donating, or commenting, everyone!

Please repost the link to the ChipIn or feel free to repost all or part of this. I don’t have a lot of readers, so signal boost is definitely needed!

Bad invention: The Catula!

April 13, 2011 Liz

The Catula, or Cat Spatula, is a ridiculous invention meant to help kind-hearted cat owners to move their cats from one place to another. It would gently pick up and move a cat from a shady place on the floor to a new, sunny patch. If your cats are asleep in a cute position on a chair or the couch, and you want to sit down, just use your Catula!

I came up with this in 2003, picturing it as a thin sheet of plastic with handles attached. Then recently I saw this video for a motorized conveyor belt picker-upper-thingie that can move a smear of ketchup and mustard without disarranging its smeariness. The video is oddly hypnotic, as the disembodied human hands swirl the ketchup with a spoon into increasingly more messed up ways, then pick it up and put it back.

This would obviously be perfect for sleeping cats – if only it were completely silent. Not a hair out of place!

It’s really the perfect bad invention. It would never work, and having a special gadget just to avoid waking up your cat, well…

News from Burn This Press

April 7, 2011 Liz

Some of you may already have a copy of my first printing of Daylighting, a long poem in a tiny book, published under the Burn This Press imprint in January. I mailed out about 80 of them, gave away more, and now have done another batch. They are small square books covered in cardstock, with nothing fancy but the linen-textured paper.

It was exciting to change the name of my press and re-think how to do things. The new books will be poetry, translations, and perhaps some rants, manifestos, or whatever feminist or political/cultural/technical polemics come my way.

Plus, what could be more inspiring than Yet Another OMFG WordPress Install?! Also, I made stickers extremely cheaply from an online address label service !

I tried to make the switch from pasteup to printout, and might go a bit further with that process now that I have Cheap Impostor, which is shareware that does imposition. You know that thing where you do a zine, and you have to make a mockup to plan out what pages go where in your xeroxable originals so that you can fold the zine correctly, and the double sided copies match up? I never knew that was called “imposition”, but it is, and if you search on that, you can find awesome software that takes a PDF and makes your zine or book with signatures of however many pages you like.

“Daylighting” is a poem about the imaginary and real, historical, past, and future of one of San Francisco’s buried streams, Islais Creek. It will turn you inside out! I’ve read it in public a couple of times now. How happy it made me! People laughed with pure outrage and disbelief!

My book for March is Bad skin, my translation of Carmen Berenguer’s “Mala piel“. The book is still tiny, but includes the original poem in Spanish, my translation on facing pages, and some notes on the translation as well as the history of Chilean indigenous ocean-going people and on ecriture feminine. I also added in some illustrations taken from historical texts about the Alcalufe people and their boats. The poem has interesting political dimensions but what you will notice about it first is that it’s a cataloguing poem, one of those poems that describes all the parts of a woman’s body. Rather than driveling on about someone’s alabaster brow and eyes like stars, Mala piel gets realy, really into the skin; pores, spots, hairiness, texture, crinkliness, tightness, stretchmarks, wrinkles, well, everything. It’s incredibly down and dirty. It may have actually made me blush more than once. I also felt a deep sense of happiness at it, as I thought of my own Bad Skin and all it means. How about yours?

It was an extremely difficult poem to translate, and I’m sure the translation has heinous errors of judgement and misunderstandings. I tried to convey various layers of meaning, neologisms, changed words, and general feminist awesomeness as well as the deep meanings I felt were there. Many are missing! Corrections, illuminations, explanations, and arguments are welcome, as always.

Carmen was very patient with my questions. Take a look at her Facebook fan page and give her a thumbs up.

I’m going to do the next book for April soon, and lay it out for final printing in Cheap Impostor.

After that I plan on printing up my epic poem about the utopian technohippies of California, “Whole Earth Catalog”, and then “Companion to the Doctor” which is about women in science fiction television shows. I say that recklessly, as neither of those are finished. No pressure!

Then translations of either two to three short poems also by Carmen Berenguer, or “Carta de viaje” by Elvira Hernandez, or something else to be determined. My hope is for smallness and density, tiny portable books, not great lumps of intimidating virtue, but mindblowing awesomeness – like carrying a speck of antimatter around with you in your pocket. Poetry is quite pointless these days in the U.S.. It’s so smug. Or it’s song lyrics, which are great, but… Maybe you need a little mind-bending dose, a reminder that language is a weird powerful beast with political power. Oh, language! And I don’t mean L=A-N=G either, I mean the sort of thing you wrap your tongue around. Carry a poem with you to look at!

If you want to be on my mailing list for tiny books for Burn This Press, let me know in email: lizhenry@gmail.com.

Beer Hat Neti Pot

March 31, 2011 Liz

I have endless frivolous bad inventions! World, I bring you . . . the Beer Hat Neti Pot. Beer hats are those contraptions that rig up two cans of beer on your head, one on either side of a hat, with plastic tubing so that the beer siphons into your mouth.

You can be too drunk to lift up your own beer and still keep drinking. Grrrreat.

Neti pots are those little teapot looking things that you stick up your nose to irrigate your sinuses with salt water. They’re very effective at helping a stuffed up nose!

So obviously, there is a socially useful medical application for the Beer Hat!

Yes, the Beer Hat Neti Pot will bring joy and healthy nasal passages ! Even if your sinus infection is so bad you can’t bear to bend over the sink to rinse your sinuses in salt solution, you can wear the BHNP in bed or around the house. The tubes come down from bottles of salt water attached to the hat, and go right up your nostrils. An elastic band will help keep the nose tubes securely attached.

Perhaps some intrepid voyagers in the world of terrible inventions would want to irrigate their sinuses with beer!

Using a nose mask or perhaps a snorkel, the backwash from your snotty nose could then be channelled into another tube that goes into a Camelbak backpack.

Or if you live on a boat like I do, you could go on deck and let your nose water flow freely into the harbor.

I have allergies and get a lot of sinus infections so I’ve had a lifetime to think about this important issue!

I will make ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Someday I’ll blog seriously about books and politics and poetry again, I promise.
Beer hat photo by Dave Nicoll

Cat eggs: another bad idea

March 27, 2011 Liz

This weekend one of my sister’s chickens laid an egg for the first time. I can’t wait till I get to find and eat an actual home-made egg. Everyone was super excited about this egg. My brother-in-law showed me an entire photo slide show of the egg, its yolk color, what it looked like cooking, and the egg on the plate with some toast, half eaten. I stared at their newly mature hen. Suddenly instead of looking delicious, like a cartoon moment where a starving shipwrecked sailor sees the chicken turn into a roast chicken, the hen morphed into a weird science-fictional egg-producing machine, and I saw it like a little robot centered around manufacturing this very complicated object, in cross section like a diagram of the Digesting Duck. OMG chickens.

The amazing taste and healthy yolk color of the fresh eggs from your very own hipster chickens, the fact that you fed them mealworms from your own urban homestead worm farm and the tops of the organic beets you had for dinner, are all lovely thoughts. But that’s not the point of chickens to me. My main love of the idea of eggs right from the chicken are about a farm girl mythos. I totally wish I could be a farm girl. In reality wouldn’t go well at all.

In books about kids on farms, chickens are awesome. You go into the barn or the henhouse amid soothing clucks and happy peeping chicks. It’s equal parts peace and bustling. You put your hand under the fluffy butt of a warm chicken into the sweet-smelling hay, and it sleepily protests as you take out the eggs and put them in basket lined with a red-checked cloth. It’s like this primal experience of nurturing comfort. Nice mother hens! Eggs! Yay! A little child could do it!

In reality, I’m allergic to chicken dander. Last time I touched a chicken, my face swelled up so much I could barely see. And hay makes me sneeze. It would be 4am and freezing on the farm. The hens would peck the hell out of my arms and face as I tried to reach under them. Even an inch-long cockroach flying into my face would make me scream and freak out, so a flapping chicken would basically be like a super powered palmetto bug that could knock your glasses right off. There’s no way. Also, in my real world, there would be no basket and everything would be covered in smelly chicken poo. Likely also covered in the blood streaming from my face and arms from being pecked half to death.

So the obvious way to fix these problems is to create cats that can lay eggs. A little genetic engineering and wham, we get CATS OF THE FUTURE. Cat eggs! There you are in bed in your cosy house. You get up and in its nest box your cat has laid a lovely unfertilized chicken-tasting egg. Hens are *not* peaceful and cosy and sleepy. Cats are! You simply side your hand under the fluffy cat and remove the egg. Instant breakfast!

Cat eggs!!!!!!!

Justbeinlacy suggests modifying the cats to also provide coffee. That sounds great in theory, but I draw the line at milking my cat.

Dealing with Internet Drama in Feminist Discourse – SXSWi panel report

March 19, 2011 Liz

The Internet Drama in Feminist Discourse panel was led by Rachel (RMJ) from Deeply Problematic and Garland Grey from Tiger Beatdown.

My notes are fairly sketchy. Many people in the room spoke up but I didn’t record everything and wasn’t sure of people’s names. The hashtag on Twitter was #femdrama, and from that tag I can see Natalia, caitlinrain, kaisersake, queenie_nyc, lzbellz. We went back and forth lot between talking about trolling or moderating obvious crap, vs. engaging in discourse between blogs as well as among commenters.

I talked a bunch in the middle of this panel, but forgot to mention that there is quite a lot about this topic and the idea of feminist “safe space” vs. Anonymous free speech in a book in 2009, The WisCon Chronicles: Carnival of Feminist SF. Section 3 of the book is all about Internet Drama, with contributions from Micole Sudberg, Cynthia Gonsalves, JJ Pionke, Hanne Blank, Vito Excalibur, my transcript of a panel called Can Internet Drama Change the World? with panelists Alexis Lothian, K. Tempest Bradford, Woodrow Hill, Julia Starkey, and K. Joyce Tsai. Debbie Notkin and I wrote a long essay about feminist culture class here, “Safe Space vs. LOLspace in the WisCon Trolling”. I think the participants push hard on the boundaries of what we expect from public discourse.

To start off the discussion, Rachel and Garland introduced themselves and mentioned their blogs and their experiences being suddenly embroiled in very intense and sometimes personal discussions online.

Rachel says drama can be useful and it can be possible to create drama for good or at least use it for good. Why would you start drama? What do we mean by it? How do you deal with people starting drama with you, in a responsible and ethical manner? How do you internally deal with the stress of it and take care of yourself while continuing on with your feminist activism?

Garland mentioned hashtag activism, like Tiger Beatdown’s #mooreandme campaign. He hopes we don’t start any new drama in this room today. If we mention recent feminist discourse online, great, but let’s not take sides on particular incidents. Rachel asks for our personal backgrounds or experience in this area.

A guy with big glasses talks a bit about a rock and roll bulletin board or mailing list he’s involved with and says drama arises over people deciding other people should be banned. Drama is splitting, divisive, and means people have to go off and make new forums.

Rachel responds that that’s how new communities formed. In answer to Rachel’s question about what drama means, I talked a bit about how the personal is political, we try to put feminisms into practice in daily life, we examine that in public discourse and it gets very intense.

Rachel talked about how criticism can be very personal and come in a barrage. It can carry the overwhelming message that we already get from society that our voices are worthless, it’s not worth continuing to put it out there. We have to separate the criticism we get that’s valid from that overwhelming societal message that we’re supposed to shut up.

Natalia talked about female leadership and the leaky pipeline. She was at a talk where Ruth Simmons was speaking; she was drained from being the token person speaking up, and Ruth said something about it being important for us to keep speaking up, because people who see us staying silent then think they’re not part of things either.

Garland talked about hostile actors, people who want to shut a conversation down or aren’t acting in good faith. Some people come in and are obvious name callers but it can also be stealthy, injecting ideas into a conversation that disintegrate it, undermine discourse, for example, the idea that “it’s just the the internet” and isn’t important. For instance Penny Arcade… (a bunch of people in the room laugh in response and talk about the dickwolves thing).

People talked about trolls and moderation and getting overwhelmed with comments. I mentioned geekfeminism.org and our comment policy. We also have filters for sensitive topics that bump comments right into moderation, like “too sensitive”.

The guy with glasses talked more about the women in Phish fandom board he’s part of. It was something like 90% women and 10% men. They started a women only forum. So excluding men was one option for improving the drama.

Teresa Van Deusen said it’s really bad when things immediately devolve into name calling. Someone talked about drama at SXSWi this year and how people in one context don’t think you might have other identities in the room. There is some poster about liking boobies and people don’t think about what that says. You can be a woman who likes women, and likes boobs, but still hates the ad and thinks it’s sexist.

Rachel talked about how drama is a really good way for some people to talk about intersectionality. People learn what language to use, how to quote people, how not to appropriate people’s words. At best it’s not a destructive cycle of anxiety where there’s drama. Someone else then talked about Amanda Marcotte whose work they admire, but she had given a speech that was appropriating things women of color had said, and then her response wasn’t good. We then talked about women of color and feminists of color being marginalized. Rachel mentioned that has plagued feminism since at least the 1800s, racism in feminism isn’t new with the Internet. Garland adds that we can screw up a lot faster now. There was some mention of intersectionality and privilege, cisgender, class, race, US-centrism, and other oppressions we fight as women.

Garland asked us to consider what we want from this discussion. What would make our day? Teresa responds that she already thinks the last 7 years or so of feminist discourse online has been amazing and beautiful.

Someone from Bitch Magazine says that when you’re feminist and blogging and unpaid and then get embroiled in drama it’s just difficult. There was more discussion of trolling, moderation, and swift banning. Rachel said that disallowing anonymous comments has been helpful for her to manage time. On her main blog she doesn’t get a ton of comments but when she writes for a bigger site the responses can be really bad. Emily May from Hollaback says at first they didn’t allow comments at all. Now they do. Michael from a small women’s college in Minnesota then talked about their online communities and I think Facebook, but my notes are incomplete.

Natalia talked about hashable and how mainstreaming feminist discourse can be important. She loves hashable and wanted to give constructive criticism of it.Their automated greeting is “Hi guys” which she criticised with the #languagematters tag. They responded fairly well, and then said “Well, it’s mostly not sexist”. Then they listened and changed the greeting to “hi there”. Rachel talked about discouraging and disallowing ablist language. Teresa said we need an app for that. The room buzzed a little about editing filters that would help alert us not to make common mistakes. It might be nice to have a WordPress plugin.

I talked some about how public discourse is documenting our consciousness raising. The riot grrrl movement isn’t well documented on the web. Maybe the web is going to make our history more obvious and accessible. Criticising other feminists is especially fraught because we are all vulnerable to the tools of misogyny, which can take us all down. Once the criticisms go mainstream, we all look bad, we’re catfighting, etc, but we have to do it and treat it as an important part of history. Very young girls are reading this stuff now, they get our history early, they are prepared. When I saw Style Rookie commenting around the feminist blogosphere it was great.

The band fan guy talked more but I did not get what he was trying to say. I totally wondered what his drama was though because he clearly had had at least one.

Someone else said please learn from feminism from past dramas. If criticized then think about it, think critically, don’t keep making the same mistake over and over, learn how to apologize, edit your posts.

Natalia: Women of color’s voices are silenced, people don’t htink about that by generalizing about this to be about white women, they’re not thinking of women of color. When we say how can we call people out in a constructive way, actually, what we need is not so much that as we need white people not to freak out when called out on their wording or on not including women of color.

There was a general “hear hear” throughout the room and a bunch of different women spoke up to say they agree.

I said some things about the tone argument and that anger isn’t a reason not to listen to someone and their point.

Someone else talked about giving way more validation and consideration to a harsh criticism when it came from a particular identity. Skye talked about that too but I missed the particular example. Garland says he can be rude and confrontational and that’s his personal style; if he feels like someone made a mistake and didn’t do it maliciously, he can be nicer, but intentions don’t matter in some ways.

An organizer from Girls Rock talked about watching teenage girls get harassed by boys, like on Facebook boys just going “girls suck” and the girls having to deal with that. How to help them in public spaces?

Rachel says, Think on how you will want to respond. What kinds of spaces are you creating? What do they have room for? What volume will there be?

People talk about when to stop engaging. What to do when people are asking over and over to be educated and you have to do feminism and racism 101 constantly. Dealing with derailing.

I said that we keep talking about intersectionality as our hotspot of feminist discourse rather than there being drama about any particular political position like abortion. As feminists talking in public we have to have a deflector shield of not listening to people telling us not to do it. Then it is all too easy misapply that shield to other feminists and allies and their critiques. We need not to dismiss criticism because it’s angry and there is a place for anger in public discourse between women and resolving it and working through it and anger doesn’t have to mean failure.

Someone talked about some Susan Faludi articles but I couldn’t hear…

Skye from Heroine Content talked about a post and comments from women of color about them being racist in their coverage of this action movie with jodie foster with a gun. She has a double standard of letting those comment through because she wants to hear those criticisms and also make them clear that they’re happening and what her response will be. (Rather than deleting a comment for being angry.) Rachel agrees and thinks it says it very well.

Someone else said we are not doing the oppression olympics with comparisons but feminism can lead people into anti racism.

Rachel says she feels it’s important to take criticism seriously when someone marginalized criticizes her privilege she looks at it straight away.

People talk about self care and it being stressful to be the person giving the criticisms . And it is important to take breaks, short or long, and look away, helpful to get away from situations for a while. Be with your friends.

Natalia talked about being uncomfortable with the analogy of stains on your record. We are human, it’s not a stain, it makes us more us, we all make mistakes and are growing.

Rachel: It’s still a mark, just because I messed up and now have grown, it doesn’t mean people have to start liking me again.

Natalia talks about the movie Switch and how she liked it a lot, then realized from online discussions that it was about violation and rape, and she felt like a bad feminist for liking the movie. She then held that self anger and disappointment, thought, let’s be with that, and how am I going to change and are we going to change? How can we become better? And not be reductive?

There was more discussion, but I don’t have the notes. The discussion successfully raised a lot of important points for people to think about, and I think established that many people in the room felt that drama, or at least heated discussion between feminists online, is important. There was some dwelling on how to react internally and in public as a person with privilege who is going to get criticized in public but also some good mention of the personal and political impact it takes on marginalized people to have to do the criticism so it was not all “tra la la learning experience”. I do think this discussion was harder to have in the environment of SXSWi than in a smaller and more feminism-focused conference, or at least harder to dive into the conversation intensely, in part because we didn’t know each other or who we were talking with other than the panelists. I would have wished for a brief introductions round for everyone in the room, but it was only a 1 hour panel so perhaps too short for that. I also would have gone for a bigger panel with more diversity among panelists. It made me really happy to get to hang out with Other Feminists on the Internet but in person!! I’m so glad we had this complicated conversation at SXSW and think it needs to keep happening. Thanks to Rachel, Garland, and all the other people in the room for showing up and kicking ass and taking inspiration from each other.

I feel I should point to existing discussions about feminism and online discourse but will need to do that in another post or later in a comment below. If anyone has suggestions or would like to point to a post round-up that already exists, please comment and link-drop!