Introductions

[forthwritten]

If you'd like to introduce yourself you can do so here. What's your subject area? What are your research and/or teaching interests? What do you do to relax?

Comments

[teej]

Hello and thanks forthwritten for creating this community!

I'm a second year part-time PhD student, based in London, UK. I'm researching the kind of narratives which contemporary white feminists in Britain are producing about the recent feminist past (from the 70s onwards), with a particular focus on issues of race and racism. Currently I'm analysing a whole bunch of texts (activist, mainstream and academic) but at some point i will be starting to do interviews as well. My interest in this topic came from knowing that there's a whole load of histories of black feminist and anti-racist organising and theorising in Britain which keeps being written out of the constantly regurgitated standard narrative of British feminism. The telling of history is always political - so narratives of the feminist past which privilege whiteness continue the process of marginalisation and racism within contemporary feminist communities and theorising... Anger and frustration at the racism and white privilege within white-dominated feminist communities & a belief in the absolute importance of history is what led me down this road to begin with.

Hope that makes some sense - I seem to get more and more confused about how to describe my project the further i come along. Does anyone else get that?

[liseuse]

I get that as well. It started off as an idea that was reasonably easy to soundbite and now it has spread and altered and I end up rambling when I try to describe it. I fail at the elevator test.

[trouble]

I just shrug and tell them I write about dead deaf people.

[forthwritten]

I seem to get more and more confused about how to describe my project the further i come along. Does anyone else get that?

Oh yes, that happens to me too. At first it seemed so straightforward but now I kind of flail around. The suffrage movement is something that people think they Know All About so I get to enjoy a fair amount of mansplaining (unfortunately not just from men) - do you get that too?

[teej]

for my topic, it really depends on what people think and know about feminism and racism as to how they respond - sometimes it leads to interesting conversations, but i also get a lot of 'oh, so germaine greer and that?' to 'why are you studying racism? - you're white' to 'well feminism is just a theory - men will always dominate the world, you should get over it' (yep that is what someone - a fellow phd student at my uni no less - said to me a few weeks ago)