So, I know this is a part of our “official” plans for what we were supposed to do this week but I think it connects because I was reviewing some resources I had put aside as I was preparing for our discussion on “Creating Community” and I think that we’ve mentioned that a further way to explore this is to continue connecting to this idea of virtual consciousness raising. I’m not sure if we want to start compliling these links to our resources tab of diablogical but I could start plugging some of these in if we are indeed interested in making a central place to refer to these readings as we come across them. I also began my journey to thinking about our main question that SLP posed for this week:

How does using blogs in the classroom and blogging while teaching enable  you to access your feminist self/selves? What is/are your feminist self/selves? Any examples from your blogs?

One article that reminded me I have many others set aside that I should list as resources is called “Feminist Empowerment through the Internet” by Lucretia McCulley and Patricia Patterson (from Feminist Collections vol. 17, no. 2, Winter 1996, pp. 5-6). I think I was the most excited about this piece, even though it’s a bit dated, because they start out by quoting bell hooks’ words from Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989).

Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech of “talking back,” that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject — the liberated voice. (hooks, 1989, p. 9)

The authors then go onto write that thier goal in the article is “to reflect on women ‘talking back’ in a different medium, that is to say, in cyberspace.” I see the connection between the goals of feminist consciousness raising and how I access my feminist self/selves through my own blogging. This idea of speaking back clearly adds the political element so necessary in our teaching, as well as provides space to share stories which is one of the three highlights you pull out of Kennedy’s article in your post here. The rest of this article focuses on the documentation of how implementing more concetrated efforts online and through email networking (woah!) that they use in some women’s studies classes that they teach about women in politics. Ultimately, I value the project of recording the use of internet technologies in their course work and what they see in terms of the importance of this work, but I also really only enjoyed th aspect of their article where they purposefully situate their work within the framework of “talking back” through hooks’ theory.

While I don’t have any specific examples in my La Kitchen Chicana blog on how I try to “talk back” I do believe the entire goal/mission of my blog is to do exactly this. As I speak about this in my “why I love to blog” post, I developed La Kitchen Chicana as I began to get really drawn into the world of (millions of?) cooking blogs. As I started readings some my Mama J (my partner’s mom who is an amazing gourmand) suggested, I realized how incredibly white everything was and how upset I got when I would come across white (often rich/privileged in other ways) women cooking “traditional” Mexican food and talking about how this tasted really “authentic” or how this was their “tradition” in making food that I feel an actual deep connection to in ways I sometimes can’t even articulate. For instance, some of my most favorite memories as a young girl involved watching my abuela (grandmother) making cheese enchilladas (sin cebolla por mi mama), pan-fried tacos (which, I would argue are the best thing in the whole world and for those who don’t know what they are haven’t truly lived), and gorditas (not some fake Taco Bell crap) but delicious maza corn patties that she would carefully and lovingly stuff with beef and papa, peanut butter and jelly, or melted butter. This comida isn’t just “ethnic night” for me, but rather represents a connection to my culture that I needed and craved as a half-brown, half-white young girl. So, to counter this flippant attitude many had to the food that meant so much to my identity as a Chicana, I created La Kitchen Chicana. Every single one of my blog posts contains a story of mi familia (my mama, sisters, tias, abuela and/or the family I have made with my partner) alongside a recipe. Sometimes for me, the story is much more important than the recipe itself, like in this entry that I wrote for my relationship to Dia de Los Muertos and the recent passing of my Aunt Cindy.  I also use my blog to document my experiences alongside mi familia, and actually, this entry features my abuela making enchilladas which have come to symbolize so much in terms of how the smells of her chile sauce really evoke a sense of family gatherings for me. These entries also allow me to create feminist theory through experience, and lead me to thinking about how I link, experience and writing, in my more creative pieces. I see my blog as an avenue to explore how I relate the importance of Chicana feminist theory to my own life, this takes many forms, the connection between identity, culture, and food and the ways I privilege the story in sharing these connections. After writing about my abuela and my research trip I learned so much about how important food was for my aunts and grandmother to gain additional income as they used to make tacos once or twice a week for a white-owned restaurant in their small Kansas town and wrote about this experience here. To me, this embodies one aspect of my Chicana feminist self. As this all connects to my dissertation project, I find that oftentimes blogging or writing about my experience as a Chicana feminist solidifies my ideas and grants me “authority” in the sense that my ideas are out there for others to interact with, it’s not just my thoughts that roll around in my head daily, but rather I have moved these thoughts into a public sphere for others to engage with them.

I think this question has been a great entry point for me to think through the value of this blog project for me personally, as a means to assert my opinions into the cybersphere as well as share stories, two components (while not mutually exclusive) seem to work more efficiently together as opposed to only in isolation. I think we’ve shared a lot of how we use blogging while teaching as a means to access students’ feminist selves that might not have had avenues to emerge and I’m sure we will talk about this more in person. This entry has been helpful in making me think through some of these thoughts in relation to creating community, virtual consciousness-raising, and the feminist self/selves.