As part of the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities, a symposium Women, Media, Politics took place at Glasgow Women’s Library on the 21st of June, 2016. I was invited to speak on my experiences of writing as a feminist. This is the speech I delivered.
Some of you will know me as Claire, @ClaireShrugged from Twitter, or maybe Sister Outrider the blogger. I write from the perspective of a Black radical feminist, dealing with topics like racism in the feminist movement, building interracial solidarity between feminist women, the application of intersectionality – all that sort of thing. The difference between me as a person and me as a blogger is rather like when Diana Prince becomes Wonder Woman.
Of all the questions I’m asked, why I started writing my blog is the easiest to answer. I noticed problems that had a tendency to repeat themselves, to recur in a way that created or contributed to a pattern. For example, the ways white feminist women can turn a blind eye to racism in a way that their politics wouldn’t allow them to disregard misogyny, how they don’t always consider the overlap between racism and misogyny, and how these factors shapes the experiences women of colour have in feminism and life in general. Patterns like that grew increasingly obvious to me the more involved I became in feminist politics. Addressing incidents of that individually on Twitter was getting exhausting as well as being incredibly time-consuming, and I found that the same questions would always come up when I engaged with women about these subjects, so having something thorough and long-form to outline my perspective in depth was appealing.
Yet in some ways, I was hesitant to start my blog. There was a kind of feeling like I was an imposter or not quite good enough, which I think is so common with women in this society, and an expectation on my part that someone smarter, more qualified, more experienced than me would step in and intervene, do a better job of articulating all the things I wanted to say. And that doesn’t really make sense. I’m currently writing the dissertation for my MLitt in Gender Studies, and during that course I’ve specialised in Black feminist theory. It’s become the staple of everything I do professionally as well as personally. Black feminist principles have underpinned my work as a journalist, covering the Predatory Peacekeepers campaign or writing about the way Black women who go missing get virtually no press coverage. Living as a Black woman, I’m conscious that this is all very much relevant to my life in the “real world” and the lives of other women too – there’s a very obvious practical application for Black feminist theory, and I think feminist writing bridges that gap.
That hypothetical perfect Black feminist blogger never materialised, and it occurred to me that she probably never would. More importantly, I realised nothing would actually change unless someone spoke out. And so it reached a point at which my impatience with racism in the feminist movement outweighed my reticence, and I created Sister Outrider. I haven’t looked back since, though some of the comments people leave make me want to take my laptop out into the garden, douse it in petrol, and set it on fire. Mostly it’s good, though. Don’t let people’s hate or derailments discourage you – that’s what they want, for you to stop and be silent.
Writing works well as a medium for me, because I wasn’t particularly brave or confident when I started out, and working with that format enabled me to make active use of my voice in a way that I otherwise wouldn’t have. Starting out, I wasn’t in a position where I’d challenge racism in a conversation with white feminist women in a one-on-one dynamic, let alone collectively. But since I started writing as Sister Outrider, that has changed completely. Now I never let the casual or intended racism slide. That’s mainly because of the response other women of colour have had to my writing, saying that what I write resonates with them, that their experiences have been the same, and that having more feminist writing dealing with the intersection of race and sex makes them feel acknowledged.
Writing about feminism forces you to think critically, to think carefully about the implications for other people too. With white women, I noticed that the most positive feedback I received for my writing came from working class and lesbian women who were enthusiastic about my structural, radical analysis of oppression. There’s a degree of responsibility that comes with gaining an audience.
The things people say still overwhelm me a bit. Since people were engaging with my ideas, and writing isn’t always an interactive way of communicating, I decided to open submissions for questions on race in the feminist movement. It was all dealt with anonymously, which gave women the freedom to be really honest. Their openness was amazing. There are points where I’m sat thinking ‘okay, but I’m just some random girl with a blog’. But if you make a positive difference to even one woman’s life, it’s worthwhile. That doubt recedes. So if you want to write, write.
Writing is a necessary part of how we develop feminist praxis – that’s a slightly unfashionable term, meaning the connection between feminist theory and activism. It’s a way of using the theory we have, modifying it, and trying to make things better in a way that’s sustainable. A lot of the things I’m writing about now are things I’d hoped for more guidance on, wished there was a feminist blueprint of sorts on how vectors like race work alongside gender. Maybe what I write will make things clearer for the women who come into the movement after me – that’s the hope.
It’s also pretty exciting. There’s such a rich body of feminist theory and scholarship – so many brilliant ideas – and seeing how women build on that, by acknowledging what has gone before and adding to it with their own perspective, is incredible. I named my blog Sister Outrider as a kind of play on Audre Lorde’s collection of essays and speeches, Sister Outsider. Her way of using difference to challenge and provoke self-reflection in others is exactly what I try to do. I also need to credit bell hooks for getting me to think about how various forms of structural oppression connect, and seeing that comfort is never the priority with feminism. Angela Davis is also a real influence, particularly with my work on interracial solidarity, because of the kinship she extended towards other marginalised people from situations different to her own. So my advice is to identify the framework that’s the foundation of where you’re writing from, and that gives your blog a consistent perspective.
Also, especially when so much Black feminist scholarship gets overlooked or side-lined, I do see it as an inherently feminist thing to highlight the work that’s gone before, to demonstrate its ongoing value, and explore how that fits in with what we do next. Honour your foremothers, and think about the implications for your little sisters too. What we write now will influence the women who come after us.
On that note, it’s particularly important that I mention the work of Patricia Hill Collins. She’s essential to Black feminist theory, and also an important contributor to the understanding of how feminist writing is significant in public discourse. The phrase she uses is “intellectual activist”, which does feel really self-aggrandising, but it also fits the definition of what we’re doing exactly. I write both from a scholarly perspective, and with a view to the politics of liberation. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, as Patricia Hill Collins points out, writing critically about power creates the possibility to drive meaningful change – the more people your ideas reach, the greater that possibility is, and feminist writing creates a lasting resource. In a digital context, it has never been easier to share your work widely.
Thank you.
Sister Outrider 