Beyond Becky: Early Feminist Blogging as Intersectional Praxis

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the feminist blogosphere emerged as a crucial site for community building and activist organization. Yet academic analysis of this early period of feminist Internet history remains limited, and popular attention has focused on the commercial success of white women bloggers like Jessica Valenti (Feministing), Jill Filipovic (Feministe), and Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon), who have since established careers in mainstream media industries, and have become figureheads for the popularization of feminism within media and celebrity culture throughout the 2010s (Banet-Weiser 2018; Keller and Ryan 2018). The history of feminist blogging then, has become tethered to strategies of neoliberal identity management (Novoselova and Jenson 2019) and a style of “white feminism” that neglects racial oppression in favor of an entrepreneurial approach to feminist activism (Daniels 2016).This paper presents an alternative history. Drawing on a larger book project, I chart the contributions of two women of color bloggers active in the early 2000s: brownfemipower and blackamazon. I employ the conference theme, “reinvention,” as a lens to consider how we might reinvent narratives of the early 2000s feminist Internet by theorizing early feminist Internet blogging as intersectional praxis. Through textual analysis of their blogs, I trace how the discursive practices of these bloggers are indicative of a history of explicit anti-racist feminism online, actively problematizing what has become known as “white feminism.” As such, this paper makes two interventions: First, it seeks to historicize the recent popular critiques of “white feminism” by scholars (Schuller 2021; Daniels 2021) and journalists (Zakaria 2012; Beck 2021) through showing how these ideas have a lengthy history within feminist digital cultures. Second, it challenges the framing of feminist blogging as a practice dominated by young white women, revealing how the presence of women of color bloggers were central to the development of feminist digital practices and contemporary feminist politics.Works CitedBanet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered. Durham: Duke University Press.Beck, Koa. 2021. White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind. New York: Simon and Schuster.Daniels, Jessie. 2016. “The Trouble With White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism, and the Intersectional Internet.” In The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online, edited by Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes, pp. 41 – 60.Daniels, Jessie. 2021. Nice White Ladies: The Truth About White Supremacy, Our Role In It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It. New York: Seal Press.Keller, Jessalynn and Maureen Ryan. 2018. Emergent Feminisms. New York: Routledge.Novoselova, Veronika and Jennifer Jenson. 2019. “Authorship and Professional Digital Presence in Feminist Blogs.” Feminist Media Studies 19 (2): 257-272.Shuller, Kyla. 2021. The Trouble With White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism. New York: Bold Type Books.Zakaria, Rafia. 2021. Against White Feminism: Noes on Disruption. New York: W.W. Norton.