I see this paper as emerging from our conversation about your last one, when you were worrying the question of whether feminism was about “justice or happiness,” and I suggested that public writing—adding to the range of social narratives we all need to imagine a wider variety of ways of being the world—might be exactly the contribution that is most needed.

What you’ve done here is recognize the problematics of a feminist blogosphere that replays many of the gendered, raced, classed patterns of older forms of communication–and yet affirm the possibilities for real change which this new technology, so untethered from the (seen) body, offers. It’s a system, as you say in closing, that is “still laden with sexism but also with the movements that are working against it.”

I have two thoughts about how you might “keep trying to think about the potential of our blogs to make change in the offline world.” One is to keep on participating, and keep on studying the phenomena; next spring, I’ll be repeating my course on “Literary Kinds” (the erstwhile “Emerging Genres”) and we will certainly take on blogs as the first sort of genre we want to understand. The last time I did this course, we spent a lot of time looking @ the ways in which the internet is reproducing the phenomenon of “gated communities,” closed spaces where like-minded can talk w/ those who agree w/ them; I’d like to keep on imagining—and making—spaces that are more open.

The other possibility I have in mind steps off from Nat’s repeated injuncture for us to stop being so U.S. focused, so Eurocentric in this course. What difference has the internet made for women in the Southern Hemisphere? Shikha has spoken and written about female suicide bombers–and I found an interesting article today about how robot bombings in Pakistan activate local Pashtun customs of revenge for lost women and children.

How might feminist blogging help us here?