Commenting Policy

Okay, so I find I have need of a comments policy. I’m not really a big fan of these, since they tend to make people feel that the space is a lot more regulated than it really is, and regulations tend to not capture what the space is like. I don’t know of any other way to specify my boundaries, though, so I’ll have to take the risk of being bad at communicating what they are.

  • All comments are moderated at the moment. I’m not a trusting person. I may change this in the future, if moderation becomes too time-consuming but right now I don’t get many comments so it’s ok.
  • “Blacklisting” is where any comment from a specified IP address goes into the spam queue to be deleted.

So, on to the rules!

  1. First and foremost, this is a safe space for women of colour. I am working on the many dimensions of centralising women of colour in my activist, blogging, and intellectual work. People who are not women of colour are welcome to comment, but keep in mind that this is the focus. Any violation of this will mean that your comments are put in moderation (obviously not the case right now, since all comments are moderated). If you continue to disrespect the policy, you will be blacklisted.
  2. I intend this space to be safe for all women of colour, including woc with disabilities, queer woc, trans woc, working-class woc, woc of many faiths, lower-caste woc, woc of ethnic minorities, and any other woc who I’ve failed to mention. I acknowledge that I may not always succeed in this. However, it still means that classism, sexism, racism, ablism, queerphobia, Islamophobia, caste prejudice, transphobia, religious prejudice, or ethnic prejudice are not welcome here.
  3. I see no good reason to play host to trolls. Anyone coming in to intentionally violate the above policies will be unceremoniously booted. Other measures of a troll include, but are not limited to:
    • using a fake email address — if you can’t be bothered to be accountable for your words, I see no need to respect them by giving them space on my blog
    • use of a ’sockpuppet’ account — if you’re a blogger or commenter who uses account details to hide your identity and escape accountability, I don’t see why I should respect your words
    • flagrant attacks on the central principles of this blog.

    3. (a) Obviously the latter involves a great deal of subjective assessment, but it is sometimes obvious when a comment is intended merely to provoke rather than to incite more just transformations, or to rail against injustice. Sometimes it’s not, and I will use my judgement about whether it is productive to allow a comment or not. The internet is not a democracy, nor is it particularly friendly to women of colour. We have to be careful about defining our spaces in order to be able to use online spaces at all. So no uncritical appeals to “free speech” will get past these injunctions.

  4. If you think I’ve been unfair to you, or any other commenter has, you can contact me about it, but I’m not promising to give you scads of my time to resolve any grievances. If your issue is with someone else, I’ll see what I can do.
  5. Any advertising spam will be blacklisted.
    5. (a) This includes soliciting link exchanges in comments.
  6. Off-topic comments will be left alone for the most part, unless they are disruptive. This is not to be taken as encouragement to leave off-topic comments or to say whatever you like, without regard for the issue at hand. If you want to communicate with me, you can use the contact form; if you want to communicate with the world, you can create your own blog, it is free.