I was tasked with leading discussion during class on 3/28 and I decided to lead the discussion around Susana Loza, “Hashtag Feminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the Other #FemFuture” reading. I was nervous about leading discussion because I know that it is hard sometimes to get very involved and talkative discussions going for our class. The discussion went well and I found that a lot of the points that I had made about the article a lot of classmates could agree upon. I also discovered even more key takeaways that the class brought up through discussion. We could all agree that social media has given women of color a voice and a platform that they had not had previously. We also found that this new platform gave white feminists another means of denying our rebuting WOC voices. We discussed how social media has progressed from the time that this article was written until now. A lot has changed since this time, yet a lot has remained the same. We could all agree that social media helped with the development of movements or activism but what it did well in gathering people together it failed at keeping these people connected and together.
We continued the discussion around social media and related it to the other readings for this week. We began to discuss the differences between conflict and abuse and what that meant to us. We could all agree that white feminist feeling innocent or bothered by WOC tweets or posts was more of a conflict problem, however, posts that were made that inflicted or proposed actual pain or emotional distress was considered to be more abuse like. We had a very good and thorough discussion around Sarah Schulman, “Abandoning the Personal: The State and the Production of Abuse” and how we felt about what she wrote. While there were good points made in the article, a lot of the class could agree that it was not all true or correct in our eyes. We then compared this article to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Protect Your Heart: Femme Leadership and Hyper-Accountability” and how her idea of abuse is different and that many people have stories similar to hers. This class was very involved and I believe that we each learned something from the other opinions and experiences that were discussed from each classmate.