Creating A New Space on Reddit

Link: www.reddit.com/radicalsolidarity

“I seek new images of identity, new beliefs about ourselves,

our humanity and worth is no longer in question”

–Gloria Anzaldúa in “La Conscientia de la Mestiza"

User-generated web content is so powerful of a tool that governments fear it. Very recently, numerous bills have been introduced in the United States and other developed nations such as SOPA, PIPA, and CISPA that are designed to censor and restrict user generated content.

Reddit is an extremely popular news-sharing website. It’s community leans young, liberal, educated, and skeptical. Many top voted comments are those that effectively engage in critical analysis. (Craik) Interestingly, only about half of Reddit traffic comes from the United States. (Reddit.com) Because of its large user base, Reddit is often used as a soapbox for public issues: There are a number of charities that have benefited from Reddit; Reddit successfully led the Internet blackout protest against SOPA/PIPA; and Reddit is currently organizing its very own PAC.

Perhaps the greatest feature of Reddit is that anyone who is familiar with the community can create and design a subreddit page of their own and attempt to organize like-minded individuals in discourse. From a Focaultian perspective, where power is equal to and can be defined by the production of knowledge (Focault, 27), we see how a successful subreddit may become a vehicle by which we can maneuver ourselves around the traditional channels and directly affect culture.

Creating new categories by which to define oneself has been a definite theme throughout WGS301. For this project we drew such inspiration from the likes of Rachel Burgess (2012) in her piece titled “Feminine Stubble”, Dorothy Allison (1996) in her book, Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure, and Cyree Johnson (2011) in “Femmeism: A Feminist Fantasy”. All three of the aforementioned writers possess intersectionalities that are at odds with one community or another and take it upon themselves to resist normative constructs by unabashedly asserting their self-defined identities as a whole.

We created a new subreddit that addresses our intersections as radical and queer feminists. Nik (straydogfreedom) is an attractive, polite, feminist, straight transman and Steph (stephferret) is a cis-privleged, humanist (feminist included), Paleolithic-minded, femme whose sexuality remains elusive.

R/radicalunity also serves to open up discourse between groups that are separate by identity but have much to gain from one another. There currently exists two dueling subreddits that go by the names r/radicalqueers and r/radicalfeminism. R/radicalqueers contains top posts that complain about the transphobia of r/radicalfeminism. It turns out, that r/radical feminist does include multiple instances of anti-trans propaganda on their sidebar (ex. a cartoon depicting the exclusion of transwomen that is meant to be comical). To understand transphobia and its associations with the radical feminist community it is best to enlist the help of Bonnie Krep’s explanation of radical feminism: “It’s basic aim could fairly be stated as, ‘There shall be no characteristics, behaviour, or roles ascribed to any human being on the basis of sex.’” (Kreps, 49) Taking into consideration these noble assertions, it can be seen how some radical feminsts may fall into the trap of pathologizing others. To question the degree to which gender is a construct is valid, but one can only accurately pathologize themselves in this regard.

Indeed, the association of radical feminism to transphobia is echoed throughout reddit and other communities as well. This is troubling to us because we hold to the tenant that human rights are of universal concern. Or as Hillary Clinton puts it in her historic LGBT speech in Geneva: “It is because the human experience is universal that human rights are universal and cut across all religions and cultures.” (Clinton) In conjunction with the sentiments of Clinton’s speech, it is important that while we maintain our individual identities, we should not define these identities at odds with the greater collective, but rather we should define them in harmony.

In short, the conflict between the communities is highly problematic because the goals of the feminist and queer movements appear to us as almost identical. Both groups stand in opposition to the hierarchal constructs of patriarchy and heteronormativity in which the gender binary can be seen as a common enemy. Both communities are oppressed by these intermingling hegemonic constructs by means of economic insecurity, body and gender performance policing, violence, harassment, and ignorances and insensitivities of the health-care industry to name a few. It should noted that among the sources reviewed on the topic of queer and feminist intersection, while many argued to the affirmative that the two groups had much in common, the actual commonalities remained undefined and elusive. This lack of specificity speaks to the necessity of opening up such a dialogue.

If we regard radical in many of its possible definitions (as a level of fundamental change that is desired, as going to the root origin of a problem, as characterized by working through unconventional channels, and as favoring drastic political, economic, or social reform (Radical)) we can begin to see how joining forces against the fundamental problem of the gender binary is actually the most revolutionary course of action to take. Inclusivity means pushing the boundaries of our consciousness and strength in numbers. Both are a necessity if we truly wish to bring about drastic change. Exclusion, on the other hand, is the primary tool of the oppressor, and there is nothing revolutionary about it.

It should also be noted that these principles of intersectionality are not limited to the relationship solely between feminist and queer identities. Through the course we have been discussing the variety of identities one might posses, and the way these identities may interact with or inform each other. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2003) “La Consciencia de la Mestiza”, she discusses the possibilities of blending identities, identities that cannot define a person singularly, rather only when linked in solidarity can they present a more complete view of ourselves. Very eloquently Anzaldúa informs us: “A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.” Such revolutionary thoughts served as some of the primary inspiration for the creation of this project. To Anzaldúa “rigidity means death”. That being said, let’s keep the floodgates of dialogue between feminism and the LGBT movement wide open, to see if we can uproot dualistic thought and affect cultural change by the creation of new meanings.

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