"The women of Bikini Kill let guitarist Billy Karren be in their feminist punk band, but only if he's willing to just "do some shit." Being a feminist dude is like that. We may ask you to "do some shit" for the band, but you don't get to be Kathleen Hannah."--@heatherurehere


Monday, July 17, 2006

Skewed

I've started reading Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, by Patricia Hill Collins, and it's quite interesting (maybe I'll have something substantial to say here later about it); most notably, so far, her description of the need for a continuing discussion about the way race, gender and sexuality intersect in particular within various African-American communities, even in the face of more and more discussions of race which consciously move away from the African-American set of experiences in order to understand these concepts more broadly.

That said, reading Collins' take on the need for various discussions from various points of view highlighted something that all of us here have been aware of since we started this groupblog: It's pretty white around here. We would love to have some men of color who are feminists posting; the lack thereof (I think) is a reflection of the newness of the blog, and of our probably whitewashed efforts to recruit--and by this I mean the only effort we've made is the 'passive' effort to ask for contributers on the blog itself. Until we remedy this situation, and as a first step toward that remedy, perhaps anybody out there reading (and, of course, our other current posters) could give me some links to some men of color who are also feminists posting/blogging/writing books about the intersections of gender and race from a feminist perpspective? (I apologize for the possible overuse of the word 'intersection' in this post, and in future posts. I'm reading Collins, as I said, and her voice/tone/jargon is downright viral.)

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