#trashing

[xeyedartworks]

I finally finished my new batch of GDW headshots! The first image is the new versions. Second image is the original, first versions.

[photo-chaussures]

[ghostriderslade]

Fuck it all, enough of this shit

[haggishlyhagging]

“Women rise to [feminist] fame not because they are lauded as leaders by other feminists ... but because the mainstream media sees in them a marketable image a newsworthy persona upon whom can be projected all sorts of anxieties, hopes, and responsibilities,” wrote Rachel Fudge in a 2003 essay on the struggle to reconcile activism and renown. This is important, both as it relates to feminism's past and to its improbable embrace by mainstream American pop culture. On one hand, social movements need the diplomacy and charisma of people who can speak and agitate on behalf of them. On the other, the need to distill complex ideas and goals down to their most simple and quotable talking points has unquestionably done harm to those movements, feminism included. Mainstream attention has oversimplifed complex issues the wage gap, the beauty myth, the debate over decriminalizing sex work and misrepresented goals. It has attributed collective successes to one person and minimized the plurality of feminist movements themselves. And it has turned countless would-be colleagues and compatriots into foes scrapping over crumbs of access and affirmation.

Jo Freeman's Ms. article "Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood" still regularly makes its way from inbox to inbox because the anguish with which it articulates the process of being sidelined, gaslighted, and shunned—all in the name of sisterhood—is still so relevant. Freeman defined trashing as something that often masquerades as critique but is wholly different: "a particularly vicious form of character assassination" that "is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences" but "to disparage and destroy." After its publication in 1976, the piece garnered more letters than any previous piece in Ms.—"all but a few," notes the essay's current preface, "relating [the writers'] own experience of being trashed." Formerly a member of the Chicago branch of radical feminists, Freeman left the movement completely after her deflating experiences. But two of her essays, "Trashing" and "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"—the latter an outline of the idealistic, leaderless context in which trashing often occurs—still put words to ongoing phenomena.

Individual feminists are used to being insulted and bullied by people who bear an inventory of beefs with feminists in general, especially these days, and inevitably online. Trashing or its contemporary cousin, "calling out," is different and usually a lot more painful because it comes from fellow feminists. Thanks in part to social media, trashings have become more public and more frequent with participants, as feminist sociologist Katherine Cross put it, "hyper-vigilant against sin, great or small, past or present." It's possible for trashings to start out with a core of completely valid critique but spiral outward into chaos as more people pile on and context is diffused. Some are way pettier: I was once informed that I was being trashed on an online bulletin board because I hadn't posed an apparently crucial question to a screenwriter I'd profiled. Trashings might be focused on an ideal of ideological purity: "careerist," for instance, is a sneer aimed at feminists who have the temerity to want to be known (or at least paid) for their work. Other trashings might result from an opinion that's unforgivably at odds with current feminist orthodoxy.

The competitiveness that leads to trashing obviously isn't unique to feminist movements, but as many people have pointed out over the years, it's likely to thrive within them because so many women, across ages and races and classes, are socialized to see themselves as connectors and uniters rather than experts and leaders; it's even more likely to fester because of the unmended rifts of past feminist movements. The incendiary tone of trashing is also heightened because the line between one's activism and identity is often as substantive as a vapor trail; trashing someone's work becomes indistinguishable from trashing the person themselves.

-Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once

[angelunderheaven]

[fitsofgloom]

Far Freaking Out!

[jerseydeanne]