Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

Look at it this way–email is one of the few environments in which anyone and
everyone can "pass" as white, heterosexual, and male unless he/she
speaks/writes out against that normative body. Now, there are advantages to
being able to "pass" in this manner (advantages that members of marginalized
groups have always gained from passing), but there are also costs. The
advantages are clear for women–no sexual harrassment, no more being ignored,
no more being marked as "other." But the disadvantage is that passing requires
adopting the language and interests and style of the folks you are passing as,
and so concerns and questions and styles that might be significant to a woman
as a woman become unspeakable. On the other hand, in this environment in
which everyone can "pass," it takes constant vigilance and a great deal of
ingenuity to create and perpetuate a nonwhite nonmale and/or nonheterosexual
textual body–difference must be inscribed in each post in a way that makes it
visible to the reader. The paradox is that "passing" allows women and nonwhite
people to be "visible" in the sense that they are not treated as "other," but it is
predicated on the disappearance of gender/racial identity. On the other hand,
refusing to "pass," and insisting on inscribing a nonwhite or nonmale identity in
our email results, often, in our being "disappeared" in the manner in which
women and nonwhite people are "normally" disappeared. The entrenchment of
the normative construct in espace (which I tend to think of as The Unbearable
Whiteness of Being) makes me feel a lot like Ellison’s Invisible Man–I’ve been
in flamewars in which I have textually kicked the shit out of people who simply
COULD NOT SEE ME. (And if you haven’t reread the opening sequences of
Invisible Man it might be worth going back to, since it sums up exactly the
phenomenon I am describing.)
>Are there other venues (listserv discussion groups in particular) where
>you are more active?
I used to be very active on quite a few lists. I’m the Typhoid Mary of flame
wars–where I post frequently, they usually become epidemic. In my Bad Old
Days I could come out swinging against racist or sexist exclusion in discussions
and rile folks up so bad that hitherto peaceful (read: "homogenous") espace
communities would polarize and then shatter. Grown men would act like
children and storm off lists or publicly swear that they were never going to read
another one of my posts. Heck, I’ve pissed people off so badly over email that
at least one has, in all seriousness, threatened my life. (And yeah, those threats
of violence–and implied rape–were gendered, too…) But I don’t do much of
that sort of posting anymore. Mostly, I just needed to experiment with it for a
while to figure out how it worked. And I concluded, after some very serious