MD, in the past I've been on threads where I had the uncomfortable feeling that there were a lot of white people talking about race, or a lot of people with male privilege talking about women, or a lot of UK/US folks talking about "foreigners", or a lot of middle class people talking about poor people, without much of an opportunity for the people whose lives we were talking about to weigh in. I've asserted before that there are power dynamics at work on Barbelith that reflect those in the world at large— i.e. people of color, women, and other groups being systematically marginalized and silenced. However, I've found that there's at least a strong minority opinion that that doesn't happen on Barbelith. I'm hoping a demography project will help me to get a better grip on why I feel so strongly that Barbelith is still replicating these power dynamics, or possibly it will show me that the dynamic I'm seeing is much less rooted in people's day-to-day identities than I previously thought, or something else entirely.
I want the survey to be anonymous so that people's fictionsuits can continue largely unaffected by it. If I'm not trustworthy enough to run the survey anonymously in the opinion of several people, I'll ask someone else to take it on— in fact anyone with more resources and/or know-how than I can feel free to step up at any point. But I would like for people to answer honestly about the identities that most shapes their perspective. I identify as a man, but my female history also shapes my perspective enormously, and for that reason I would feel strongly obligated to identify myself as a trans man, rather than a 'default' (where default is often read as non-trans) man. No matter how much I would rather not cop to being white, my whiteness shapes my perspective enormously, and I'd better own that if the survey means anything to me. As far as I'm concerned, if the perspective of a greatly experienced woman significantly shapes the posts of the entity sometimes known as Alex and sometimes known as Alex's Grandma, A and AG could each fill the survey out if they want.
But if you think Barbelith really should be a space where people's history and identity is held to somehow not affect the perspective they put forward here, I think that's impossible. We can acknowledge that effect or not, but it exists already. Pretending it doesn't would be fine if this were a roleplaying game, but for whatever reason it seems the opinions expressed here occasionally make a big difference in how people see the world. There are real effects to how we talk about things here. Not earth-shattering ones, but matters of just enough consequence that I'd rather take the role our offline identity is already playing seriously enough to examine it, instead of sticking our heads in the sand.
Gods know the fiction-suit, blank-slate power over my own identity here has been extremely useful to me in the past, and I hope it will continue to be useful to others in the future. I don't think an anonymous survey, provided care was taken to keep it anonymous, would actually harm that... am I wrong?
Thoughts? Does this seem terribly misguided? |
