As everyone no doubt now knows the old debate on gender and blogging has re-emerged with many, perhaps most, claiming their liberal credentials. Just one point general point: the idea of conspiracy theory (see e.g. Mike Bird's blog but the following criticisms certainly apply to many). Now, several posts have openly talked about broader institutional problems in higher education or organised religion (lack of women represented in higher education etc) and that seems dead right and that is typically how ideological analyses of higher education and intellectual culture work (from gender to a variety of other issues relating to power - class, race and so on). Of course, there will always be the odd crazy (or possibly even decent) individual who'll have an influence on things but do people really need to be defending themselves against charges of being personally misongynist and so on? Instead, if people want to continue this debate, perhaps the following could be a guide: a) avoid the defence of how the given blogger is indiviudally not sexist; b) avoid the mildly angst-ridden liberal rhetoric; c) keep critiquing cultural and social trends which maintain gender roles and power structures and so on and so on and so on; d) look at how dominant power roles in groups influence general outputs, irrespective of how wonderfully liberal given person is, and, for the love of all things holy, e) avoid the impression that listing favourite women might just be little more than tokenism (Jim West was right to critique this sort of thing).
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