Meta - White Women's Tears Edition

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:07:06 GMT

Posted by: facetofcathy

The White Women's Tears and/or White Women's Syndrome collection of meta links.

If you Google the term, White Women's Tears, the first hit is the Feminist SF Wiki where you get a very short definition that emphasizes the term as joking or sarcastic and doesn't dig into the complex intersection or race, gender and power (in a primarily US context) that the phenomenon referred to is formed by.

I feel that, much like a lot of other "bingo card" terms, this one is often being parsed by people intuitively and they're missing the underlying issues the words are meant to refer to. With that in mind, and in light of a recent fannish incident of the term being used and the numerous conversations that resulted, I decided to gather some examples of some more complicated thinking about the words themselves and the realities they arise out of.

( links under the cut )

ETA March 29:

Three links on the same topic, all of which contain some insights into the idea of defining Female White Privilege.

Go After the Privilege, Not the Tits: Afterthoughts on Alexandra Wallace and White Female Privilege by Andrea Plaid--there are a lot of deniers in comments but the rebuttals are brilliant.

The Feministe Reblog of Same Included for the denial fest and near total lack of rebuttal in the comments as an object lesson.

Womanist Musing follow up

comments

It's not about what you wrote...

Meta - White Women's Tears Edition