SoCal Fem Feature, 2.0
Let’s Do This…Again
Remember when everyone was blogging? I had a blog on Blogger.com on and off for ten years, from 2010 to 2020. I mostly documented my personal life for family and friends, as a means of keeping in touch with everyone without having to individually keep in touch with everyone.
Halfway through my time using Blogger, I added a political opinion page to my blog that I called the “So-Cal Fem Feature”. Here’s how I described it in 2015:
Now that I've written one hundred posts it seems like the appropriate time to set a new goal for the blog. This specific goal is something I've been thinking about for months and I actually considered starting a separate blog dedicated to it but I realized I don't have the time for that so I'm going to add it to this blog instead. Since C and I both regularly follow the news - and I specifically am interested in current events that deal with women - my new goal for the future of this blog is to feature one post every other week or so regarding my thoughts and opinions on some of those issues that are local to Southern California - let's call it the SoCal Feminist Feature, if you will. This new goal makes me nervous because I've battled with the decision to keep this blog away from politics or, instead, to voice my concerns. I think it's time to try something new so I'm going to go ahead and do it with the hopes that I won't lose any of the few followers that I have.
A whole freaking lot has changed since the nine years that I wrote that paragraph. Obviously. Most notably, for this publication at least, is that I am no longer nervous to voice my opinions publicly.
This publication is the reincarnation of the “So-Cal Fem Feature”. But now I’ve spent enough time in Southern California to know that SoCal doesn’t have a hyphen. I hesitate to identify as a feminist anymore because I don’t want to accidentally get lumped in with white feminism. But, as bell hooks reminds us, we can take back the power of identifying as a feminist:
Feminist politics is losing momentum because feminist movement has lost clear definitions. We have those definitions. Lets reclaim them. Let’s share them. Let’s start over. Let’s have T shirts and bumper stickers and postcards and hip-hop music, television can radio commercials, ads everywhere and billboards, and all manner of printed material that tells the world about feminism. We can share the simple yet powerful message that feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression. Let’s start there. Let the movement begin again.
So, here I go. I do hope you’ll follow along.
