Blog closed

This blog is no longer adding new posts. But it will remain up as an archive.

Looking back, and looking forward

I’ve really enjoyed this period of looking back at the blog, and hearing from co-bloggers. I’m so very grateful to Lady Day for organising it!

It’s prompted some reflections of my own. One thing it prompted me to do was to try to figure out when the blog started. I couldn’t actually work out how to make wordpress tell me, but I found this interesting one-year anniversary post, which told me that we started in May 2006. I do remember vividly what led me to start it: a conversation in the snow with Sally Haslanger, in which she urged me to start a blog and I resisted, insisting that I wasn’t the blogging type. I decided to go ahead because (a) I was already emailing links round to like-minded friends, and I thought I could put these on a blog, expecting it would only be those friends reading it; and (b) I thought some of my students might be the blogging type. I didn’t expect all that followed from this.

Pretty quickly, the reach of the blog defied my expectations. I expected maybe three readers and we were almost immediately up into the thousands, such was the hunger for something like this. Admittedly, not all of those were probably looking for a feminist philosophy blog (e.g. those who searched “loving wife spanking”, our most popular search in the first year). I’m pleased to say that our all-time greatest hits now include some important posts that weren’t just found by accident. Still, it’s not quite what I expected. Our number one post of all time is just a link to something someone else wrote. But number two is Red Eyed Tree Frog’s Christmas Trees Not So Harmless. The Gendered Conference Campaign comes in at number 7. And then we have a very large number of posts about incredibly bad behaviour in philosophy. I like to think we’ve done some good for the profession by calling attention to these.

Our blogging team also rapidly increased. At the start, it was just me, Stoat, and Monkey. By the end of the first year we had added Cornsay, Digivordig, Edna in the Sea, Heg, Introvertica, JJ, ProfBigK and Telbort. At the moment there are 40 names on the books. (I don’t even know for sure how many people they name!)

I think one of the blog’s greatest successes has been the Gendered Conference Campaign. This has, I think, helped to normalise the idea that people should notice the demographics of their invited speakers, and try to avoid homogeneity. It has been one factor among many helping to inspire similar campaigns in other fields, and additional ones in our own. But my happiest moment associated with this campaign was when it acquired a theme song.

I hope we’ve contributed in other ways: helping people, philosophers and non-philosophers alike, to find feminist philosophy; drawing attention to sexism, and other and overlapping prejudices, in philosophy; and, more generally, helping to build a community that could work together to improve our profession.

Back in the optimistic early days of blogging when we started, we thought we could manage comments with what I called the “be nice” rule. It sounds very feminine, but those who know me know that it’s a reference to the classic Patrick Swayze philosopher/bouncer movie Roadhouse. And of course if you know your classics you know that in addition to there being a time to be nice there’s also a time to be not-nice. The internet has become a complicated place, and figuring out the time to be nice and the time to be not-nice has revealed itself as beyond the abilities of even Dalton, world-famous bouncer with a degree in philosophy. We had many behind-the-scenes discussions about how to draw these lines, and couldn’t agree a clear way forward. But we felt we needed one if we were to continue. That’s no small part of why this blog is ending.

People have asked what I will do next. Which is odd, since it’s not like blogging was my profession and now I need to find a new job. But anyway… I’ve been thinking a lot about my deeply held view that online discussions of difficult issues are currently toxic to the point of being counterproductive. One thing I am trying to figure out is what we can do instead– how to have productive, inclusive discussions of difficult issues. I’ve got some ideas, and I’m trying things out. But I’m not going to discuss them online– not now, anyway.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what all of the FP bloggers and readers do next. There are so many more places and ways to do feminist philosophy online now, and there’s a vast community out there to do it.

Accessing Feminist Philosophers

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell.

There’s an apocryphal quote that is usually attributed to Helen Keller that goes something like this: blindness separates you from things, but deafness separates you from people. It turns out that Kant wrote something about this in his Anthropologie (aside: for all the hours I’ve been thinking about this farewell post, I must say that starting off with a reference to Kant never occurred to me, but blogging has a way of swerving the words on the page).

It’s hard to put into words how excited I became once I discovered the philosophy blogosphere and Feminist Philosophers.

I could finally understand without guesswork what other philosophers were saying, and having the words on the page to be read, not speech-read, meant that I had an equal footing when it came to accessibility. I’d never had the opportunity to communicate with philosophers without having to do the additional work of speechreading inference or working through an interpreter (who didn’t have the background in philosophy the rest of us did).

It was through Feminist Philosophers that I found a sense of community in the informal aspect of academic philosophy. There were many times when we disagreed — sometimes publicly on the comments page, but also on long email threads. I will miss those threads, time-consuming as they were, because of the respect we showed each other, even in times of deep contention. They were also another (inadvertent) accessible feature of doing philosophy that hadn’t been available to me — I learned much from reading and participating in them.

What I find most bittersweet about shutting down Feminist Philosophers is that this venue of informal philosophical exchange will now only exist as an archive. I learned philosophical jargon and ‘insider catchphrases’ by reading the comments, I learned about other feminist philosophers, including about other disabled feminist philosophers of color (our numbers are small, but we exist!) by reading the comments, and I learned that the written word modality of social media was a way for philosophers who were deaf or hard of hearing or had other communication disabilities could participate in conversations that prior to this were difficult to access.

Access to the informal conventions of feminist philosophy will still continue to exist as an archive, but it will be a snapshot of a certain period of time and place. And so, I worry about how others on the margins will gain access to the shifting social capital and conversations that may not be present in their departments — whether this is access related to disability or other factors. My hope is that with the closure of Feminist Philosophers, we can continue the spirit of this blog by continuing to invite others into our conversations, in whatever formats are needed for inclusion.

To my fellow bloggers, I want to say how honored I was to be invited to join you, and what an incredible privilege it has been to work with you to make a difference. To the readers of Feminist Philosophers, I’m grateful for the sense of community you helped to build, and especially for making it possible for me to see the range of ways to engage and sometimes, to spar! To Jenny, thank you for having the vision and the fortitude to keep Feminist Philosophers going, especially when the path was a tangle.

Imagine Sisyphus Happy

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell.

The internet is exhausting. Academia is exhausting. Politics are exhausting. It’s a bit of a miracle—and a testament to the dedication my co-bloggers—that Feminist Philosophers had such a long run, given its subject matter and role in the discipline. It is hard to have productive conversations on the internet about anything, let alone contentious matters of deep social import. And trying to effect change in academia about things as simple as copier use, or keeping a departmental fridge clean, can leave one feeling like Sisyphus—so, when I think about how my predecessors here at Feminist Philosophers successfully shifted the status quo of the entire discipline, I am nothing less than awed with their accomplishments. I’m grateful for everything they’ve done, and it would be unfair to expect more of them. I am, though, one of those who remains optimistic about the potential for online discourse to be a real force for good in the world. I want to use my last post here at Feminist Philosophers to say something about why I think engaging in tough conversations online is still worthwhile, despite its seeming futility.

In the 1960’s, Stanley Milgram, conducted a series of well-known experiments at Yale regarding obedience to authority. If you aren’t familiar with the details, participants thought they had been randomly selected to play the role of “Teacher” in an experiment on memory. Those who were assigned the role of “Learner” were actually part of the research team, though the “Teachers” didn’t know it. The basic experimental set up was this: The Learner was supposed to learn list of words, and then recall it. If they made a mistake when reciting it, the Teacher was supposed to administer a shock to the Learner. Learners weren’t actually given shocks, but the Teachers didn’t know that either (and they were given a low-level shock themselves at the beginning, to have a sense of what it would feel like). They were told the voltage of the shocks would go up with each mistake, until it reached 450 volts. In one version of the experiment, where the Learners were hidden by a wall, once the shocks reached a certain point, they would vocalize discomfort, ask to be released, and when they weren’t, if the Teacher kept going, they’d stop responding, as if they were unconscious. If the Teacher objected, the experimenter would ask them to continue – until the Teacher objected five times, at which point the experiment would end. Roughly 2/3rds of participants continued all the way through, administering the highest voltage. In a variant condition, where Teachers and Learners were in the same room, full compliance dropped to 40%. In a condition where the Teacher needed to touch the Learner to administer the shock, compliance dropped to 30%. Proximity to others—as basic as merely being in the same room—can enable resistance, and consideration, when callous deference to the status quo would otherwise be the norm. Engaging in discourse with each other online is a way of creating cognitive and imaginative proximity when physical proximity isn’t possible.

Of course, whether online discourse is successful will depend on whether we actually talk to each other rather than past each other; and obviously, that’s actually really hard. It’s hard for a lot of reasons. For one, in matters of moral or political dispute, we all tend to think we’re right and the other guy’s a jerk or troll. Elif Batuman illustrates a nearby phenomenon poignantly in The Idiot:

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo: a Disney movie about a puny, weird-looking circus elephant that everyone made fun of. As the story unfolded, I realized to my amazement that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, the ones who despised and tormented the weak and the ugly, were rooting against Dumbo’s tormentors. Over and over they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to the bullies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.

That we all tend to think we’re the good guy can make genuine discourse about controversial matters especially challenging.

Talking to each other can be hard for another reason though. Who we take to be authoritative, credible, or even legible, is not determined in a vacuum. Our beliefs are deeply interconnected. Our political views are informed by our social networks. What information we recognize as interesting, relevant, or trustworthy is shaped by our social relationships. When our friends communicate, we understand them. When we interact online with people who are very different from us, have different background evidence, different relationships, different interests, different experiences—it can feel as if we’re speaking different languages.

It’s not impossible though.

I know minds can be changed because my own has been, many times. The first feminist philosophy course I took was an independent study. I suspected feminist epistemology was nonsense, and set out, initially, with the aim of arguing as much. That research led me to this blog. I became a regular reader, then a commenter, and in graduate school, a contributor. (If you want to read a genuinely fascinating story—Megan Phelps-Roper, previously of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church—went through a radical conversion via Twitter.)

I’m not naïve. I know engaging online can take a personal toll. We all have limited time, limited energy, and too much to do. There were times during my run as a blogger here where’d I’d get hateful messages posted about me on other sites, or sent to me directly—ranging from ordinary personal insults, to violent threats. Professional philosophers would regularly tell me that, as a graduate student, it was unwise to say much of anything online. If I had a dollar for every time someone said ‘keep your head down, wait till you have tenure,’ I’d have better odds at being rich than the average graduate student has at actually landing a tenure-track job in the first place. But if we share these burdens—if we take turns engaging, if we’re generous with one another, if we intervene when we witness bad behavior—together, we can accomplish enormous things.

Imagine Sisyphus happy, not because the world is absurd, but because erosion–tedious, slow, challenging–ultimately moves mountains.