thenation | In the summer of 2012, twenty-one feminist bloggers and online
activists gathered at Barnard College for a meeting that would soon
become infamous. Convened by activists Courtney Martin and Vanessa
Valenti, the women came together to talk about ways to leverage
institutional and philanthropic support for online feminism. Afterward,
Martin and Valenti used the discussion as the basis for a report, “#Femfuture:
Online Revolution,” which called on funders to support the largely
unpaid work that feminists do on the Internet. “An unfunded online
feminist movement isn’t merely a threat to the livelihood of these
hard-working activists, but a threat to the larger feminist movement
itself,” they wrote.
#Femfuture was earnest and studiously politically correct. An
important reason to put resources into online feminism, Martin and
Valenti wrote, was to bolster the voices of writers from marginalized
communities. “Women of color and other groups are already overlooked for
adequate media attention and already struggle disproportionately in
this culture of scarcity,” they noted. The pair discussed the way online
activism has highlighted the particular injustices suffered by
transgender women of color and celebrated the ability of the Internet to
hold white feminists accountable for their unwitting displays of racial
privilege. “A lot of feminist dialogue online has focused on
recognizing the complex ways that privilege shapes our approach to work
and community,” they wrote.
The women involved with #Femfuture knew that many would contest at
least some of their conclusions. They weren’t prepared, though, for the
wave of coruscating anger and contempt that greeted their work. Online,
the Barnard group—nine of whom were women of color—was savaged as a
cabal of white opportunists. People were upset that the meeting had
excluded those who don’t live in New York (Martin and Valenti had no
travel budget). There was fury expressed on behalf of
everyone—indigenous women, feminist mothers, veterans—whose concerns
were not explicitly addressed. Some were outraged that tweets were
quoted without the explicit permission of the tweeters. Others were
incensed that a report about online feminism left out women who aren’t
online. “Where is the space in all of these #femfuture movements for
people who don’t have internet access?” tweeted Mikki Kendall, a feminist writer who, months later, would come up with the influential hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen.
Martin was floored. She’s long believed that it’s incumbent on
feminists to be open to critique—but the response was so vitriolic, so
full of bad faith and stubborn misinformation, that it felt like some
sort of Maoist hazing. Kendall, for example, compared #Femfuture to
Rebecca Latimer Felton, a viciously racist Southern suffragist who
supported lynching because she said it protected white women from rape.
“It was really hard to engage in processing real critique because so
much of it was couched in an absolute disavowal of my intentions and my
person,” Martin says.
Beyond bruised feelings, the reaction made it harder to use the paper
to garner support for online feminist efforts. The controversy was all
most people knew of the project, and it left a lasting taint. “Almost
anyone who asks us about it wants to know what happened, including
editors that I’ve worked with,” says Samhita Mukhopadhyay, an activist
and freelance writer who was then the editor of Feministing.com. “It’s
like you’ve been backed into a corner.”
