Well, here it is. All 439 words.
Central to our arguments about accessibility and the transformative and transgressive potential of blogging and feminist pedagogy is this belief: blogging while teaching and teaching with blogs in the feminist classroom allows us to engage in feminist consciousness-raising practices in online, offline and online/offline spaces. Borrowing from Tracy L. M. Kennedy and her essay “The Personal is Political: Feminist Blogging and Virtual Consciousness-Raising,” we describes these practices as forms of virtual consciousness-raising (or VCR).
As we understand it, VCR is concerned with cultivating a feminist self/selves. It can involve troubling the status quo by developing a critical consciousness about the world and injustice in its many forms; recognizing how the personal is political and how our individual experiences and stories intersect in ways that we might not always easily anticipate; making deep and meaningful connections with others through the sharing of stories and focused critical reflection on oppression; and promoting wide-spread critical awareness and social transformation.
Using blogs enables our students to engage in these VCR practices in some compelling and exciting ways. Our course blogs provide students with a creative and critical space for crafting, reflecting on, and expressing thoughts about class discussion or readings, experiences and personal stories. They provide students with the means for sharing those expressions with a wide range of others and for those others to share their expressions with them in accessible and immediate ways. They provide students with the opportunity to collectively and critically reflect on their thoughts and experiences and to expose the underlying structures that shape and regulate those experiences. And our course blogs provide students with resources for developing the critical tools that they need in order to resist, transgress and transform oppressive power structures.
Our personal blogs also provide us with a space for accessing our feminist self/selves and for engaging in some productive VCR practices. For example, KCF uses her blog, La Kitchen Chicana, to talk back to the predominantly white and privileged foodie blog community and their appropriation and uncritical consumption of the foods that ground her Chicana identity and that connect her to her familia. She also uses her blog as a space for spreading critical awareness about the significance of food for shaping culture, community and our individual identities. SLP uses her blog, (making/being in/staying in) Trouble, to trouble the rigid restrictions that are often placed on what counts as academic research and writing and to inspire others to do the same. She also uses her blog to experiment with new ways of expressing and promoting feminist curiosity and of connecting her academic training with her life outside of the academy.
What do you think, KCF? Anything you want to add/change about my description of your personal blog (or anything else)? Any other thoughts?