Tuesday, May 18, 2010

101 Reading List

Welcome to the Silver Goggles 101 Reading List. Here you will find links to blogs, articles and discussions online which heavily influence the discourse on Silver Goggles. This post should have gone up way sooner, but until I wrote Countering Victorientalism and got an overwhelming number of clueless people, I had no idea how much it was needed. I don't like having to re-state things over and over again, especially when other people have said it much better than I can!


This is not to look down on anybody who visits this blog and is still very much at 101 level. I understand your position; I've been there myself - during my third year of my undergrad, I took a course which was cross-listed from the Women's Studies graduate program to the English undergraduate program, because the professor teaching it noticed a few of us in her classes who would be interested in such a course, and we had expressed interest in taking it. There were initially 10 of us in the class, 4 of us were undergrads. This number whittled down to 5 - myself as the only undergrad. 

The patience it must have taken to educate myself and the other undergrads on the issues within the course was incredible; I always felt left behind, and perhaps it's my obnoxious arrogance but I still felt comfortable discussing with them as equals, even though I was so far behind in what I understood of feminism among women who had been both studying the theory and participating in activism for longer than I had been at my undergrad. 

It is from their warmth and generosity that I understood that there is nothing inherently wrong with being at 101-level. There is also nothing wrong with wanting to discuss certain difficult concepts, or requesting clarification, because fresh eyes may lead to a better understanding of our subject matter. It is a disadvantage to halt the conversation from moving forward just to re-explain basic concepts, when we wish to negotiate other, larger concepts, but it is by no means awful or terrible. 

So here are a list of resources and whatnot for you to read at your leisure. Most of these links deal with media analysis of gender and race. I often write from an intersectional viewpoint, but most of my frame deals heavily with race, so that's what you'll get. I hope you'll find these links useful as much as I did.

So, without further ado: 

Articles:
Moff's Law @ Racialicious
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (I find this article to be a bit dated, but it serves as a useful first step in understanding white privilege) (PDF)
Ten Things Everybody Should Know About Race
Thoughts on Orientalism, Imperialism & Steampunking Asia by Ay-Leen the Peacemaker (This is the article that started it all! From her original post on MySpace, I contacted Ay-Leen, and we went from there to Silver Goggles and Beyond Victoriana and show no signs of stopping! Ph34r us!)
Things I Don't Have To Think About Today by John Scalzi. Let this white man lay out for you what privilege looks like from a white man's point of view.


Discussions:
Linkspam - of particular interest: Victorientalism. And Round #2
What Is Cultural Appropriation @ The Angry Black Woman
[info]rydra_wong's linkspam of the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM 2009 aka RaceFail '09, continued here because it ran out of LJ space. Pls to be takin ur time readin this, np.


Blogs to read:

Please note that none of these can be read and understood in a short period of time. When I write, I draw from a few years' worth of understanding, starting from 101-level to what I'm doing now. It is perfectly fine to take your time in getting through this list. In fact, you may need time to understand them. Sometimes it means you have to step back and process it, and sometimes it means continuing to read the next few articles, to see if they clarify things better. Other times, you'll find that once you've read other stuff, you come back to the first thing you had such difficulty with and find now you get it, because you're absorbed more information.

Happy Reading =) If there are some things you don't understand and need a quick answer for, fire me an email or a tweet and if I'm feeling up to it, I'll try to clarify things for you.

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