I have lots of thoughts on this crap, but none of it is coherent. I wonder, for instance, not just whether you should quote extensively from people without asking when you’re writing about an instance in which people felt that there was a lot of “borrowing” without asking. I wonder if it’s even “fair use” to use whole blog posts without asking permission. I wonder about that dude’s friend, who seems like he might be being abused by his wife, and his friend sees his weird behavior and ascribes the problem to “women” or “feminists” and not to abuse. And I wonder if I really believe in redemption and I think that I don’t. Or at least, I don’t believe redemption then means you get to put yourself center stage.
I wonder what disciple the dissertation is in. I don’t think it would occur to me to get permission to quote from anyone, but I would of course cite them. I know my work has been cited and no one asked me. That’s sorta how it works, right?
But I do think that 2 concerns raised over there do matter. I just don’t know what to make of talking about the distinction between the moral and academic obligations of feminists and intellectuals.
First, if the person is a member of a community researching a community, the IRB might should have something to say. That’s why I ask the discipline. But she isn’t interviewing or surveying them. It seems she’s analyzing what she observed.
And second, to not discuss her own self and role in the work seems like bad work. But why not just make it a critique of her work? Flavia’s tone bothers me. It feels less like engagement than harsh judgment.
It cannot be the case that white women can never talk about women of color. That just doesn’t make sense. But, yes, white women do often do a terrible job of talking about women of color, of getting clear about what’s at stake in feminism being inclusive and intersection. We have to figure out how to do this better, not tell white women they can’t succeed.
Actually, if your dissertation claimed to be studying the individuals quoted (rather than using them as secondary, buttressing sources), I think your university’s Research Office would raise a hell of a ruckus if you didn’t get permission. I base this on long and tedious lectures from university research officers* and on the trouble taken by someone who wrote a scholarly article analyzing an e-mail list of which I was a member to get permission for everything he quoted, even anonymously/pseudonymously.
*Trust me, I could not even get myself exempted from them by pointing out that the people I study have been dead for many centuries, and that I cite their appearances in public documents, not private communications. No, that didn’t matter. It was necessary for me to Understand These Important Procedures To Follow.
It looks like she’s getting a law degree of some sort. It wouldn’t occur to me to get permission to quote from a book or journal article, no, that’s true. But it would for private correspondence between living people.
And I’m not sure where exactly blogs fall on that continuum. It’s surely not private correspondence, but it’s not the same thing as a published book or journal article.
Plus, she quotes Brownfemipower pretty extensively and those posts are no longer on the internet. She had to go to the Wayback machine to get them. So, in that case, she’s literally quoting from material the author has sought to unpublish.
It seems to me that she’s trying to act, on the one hand, like a scholar from a more text-based field–the blogs are her texts and she’s analyzing them. But on the other hand, she only knows this stuff happened and that these blog posts existed because she is, in fact, a participant observer and I don’t think that anthropologists or sociologists have gotten to sit around academically observing people without their consent in some time.
I would not ask permission to quote anything from the NYT, op ed or otherwise. I guess I think of blogs similarly – as public opinion. But surely not private correspondence. If that’s included, well, she’s clearly violating academic standards, not just moral ones.
I think the idea that one can “age out” of the feminist blogosphere tells us about something else wrong with the feminist blogoshere, as well.
I’ve been thinking (and drafting a post) about this too: I “riff” off a lot of other bloggers. I cite and link, and granted, the blogosphere is not academia, not by a long shot, but is this, if not unethical, intellectually lazy? I’d never use an entire blog post for anything, cited on not. Given the feminist blogosphere’s history of appropriation, I’m surprised that anyone who’d claim to be a member of it would go there.
The issue comes down to the respective attitudes toward unwitting participation. Academia tries very hard to ensure that people who have participated in a study have done so only after giving permission. So the people being studied, surveyed, whatever, have to give explicit consent. The authors of books or articles being cited in a study, however, are assumed to have given consent to being quoted, cited, argued against, etc. by the act of publishing those works. Obviously, citing at too great a length or without proper citation is plagiarism, and citing truncated or edited selections that misrepresent the original author’s position is dishonest.
The blogosphere tends to take the position that putting up a blog post constitutes publishing, and that any blog post can be cited or quoted in another. Therefore there is no such thing as unwitting participation.* The question then becomes whether a blogger can unpublish — is a post, once posted, to be considered published forever? Or can a blogger, in taking a post down, fairly ask that it not be cited elsewhere?
The blogosphere has no rules against plagiarizing or misrepresenting a source, and there doesn’t seem to be any consensus about whether comments on a blog post should be considered published. This, I think, is a huge problem for the blogosphere.
nm, and what degree of unpublished is necessary? One can request exclusion or removal from the Wayback Machine – but the post is still going to appear in quoted forms, and possibly in RSS feeds. What is “enough?”
On my way home I was thinking about how I’d feel if I found myself quoted in her dissertation and I decided that I’d think it was strange for her to quote me without telling me, but not wrong-wrong. I mean, one thing about the internet is that, when someone reads you and quotes from you, they usually link to you, not just so that people can see where they got the ideas from, but so that you know you’re being talked about.
So, I feel a little like quoting without informing, while maybe academically okay, is bad etiquette.
But I also think that, if I were her adviser, I’d be troubled by the idea that she’s writing about an incident in the recent past that took place among people who all are, as far as I know, still living, and she doesn’t contact them to find out what they think about the situation now.
The whole idea of treating their words on years’ old blog posts as texts that tell you all you need to know about their ideas about this topic is strange. Even in her dissertation, she seems to think that the drawback to her approach is that she couldn’t possibly read everything that was said in the blogosphere on the subject, not that she didn’t see what the principal players thought now.
I don’t know, I see all this struggle and anger as part of the growth of feminism. We have 5000 years or more of patriarchy plus all the intersecting oppressions of race and disability and what have you to confront and dismantle, and still only a small percentage of the planet even knows or cares about doing so. Is it really surprising that the process is so messy and slow?
Ha, well, true enough. I guess if it were comfortable or easy to figure out, we’d know it wasn’t changing us enough.
I haven’t visited the second and third links yet, but that first link reminds me of so much that I hate about the murk surrounding blogs and, especially, blog comments.
I’ve bitched loudly and long on other occasions about people who “write” books that are essentially compiled of blog comments. This seems to be the same garbage.
As for aging out of the feminist blogosphere, I’ve never lasted very long in it, as a general rule. I will sometimes lurk. But my lord. What is it with the Feminist Blogosphere and all the tl;dr posts?! I’ve never seen a set of work more in need of editing and conciseness as the feminist blogosphere in general.
I can’t believe you’re still here.
I can’t believe I read that whole Schwyzer piece.
This is like walking into de ja vu Bizarroland.
I know. Everyone’s gone to Tumblr and Facebook, but I just haven’t made the leap. Probably won’t.
Ooh, @emjb, that ties neatly to an excellent post I read recently on exactly that thought with regards to other communities:
http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2011/12/contentious-strategy-arguments-in.html