SXSW 2009: Navigating gender and identity online

It’s been interesting to note how many panels here at South By Southwest Interactive have a gender/sexism angle. On Saturday, Samhita and I caught a panel on the web and feminism with Heather Gold, Julia Angwin, Betty Flowers (director of the LBJ presidential library), and Danah Boyd. Boyd had some great thoughts on privilege and gender online, and we recorded some audio, which I’ll post tomorrow.

Also, on Sunday, the awesome Liz Henry was kind enough to take super-detailed notes at Samhita, Amanda, Cecily and my panel about combating online misogyny. Her almost-transcript is here. A sample:

Ann: 6 of us who write on Feministing and we can all each other up and go “i know people say mean shit all the time but this one really got to me!” and we all know how it feels. sometimes you have to decide what is a good public fight to have, vs. “you just want to call me ugly and tell me to make you a sandwich” i know it sounds ridiculous but it is hard to tell the difference sometimes! we need help in figuring that out, when to engage and when not to. you can engage with people who just don’t get it. But Feministing is on our terms. we don’t like it, we can delete your comment. we can respond to just part of what you’re saying and ignore the rest. or we can have a full blown back and forth, having a community to help decide and talk about how to engage has been crucial

Amanda: the purpose is to shut you up and if they don’t get what they want, they stop trying to shut you up, the more I don’t go away, and don’t shut up, the less harassment i get. just go out there and write every day and eventually they will give up. it’s not working, it’s straight up behavioral science.

Cecily: these tools that help us to get our voices out there, also hurt us. social networking tools.

Samhita: Twitter is a very useful tool. Communities, we have different community that comments on our youtube videos, twitter is another micro group environment and you get to know people a different way. That’s very powerful. I’ve had friends on my twitter feed who in the blogging worlds we have knock down “your mama” fights but on twitter I’m like “Oh you do yoga? i do yoga toooo!” lol. It’s less serious, less formal, commenting on Feministing can feel very formal.

Still hoping we’ll have audio/video from the panel shortly.

Right now there’s a panel going on about Obama and the afrosphere. You can watch the livestream here.

Oh, and remember, our happy hour with Pandagon is TONIGHT. If you’re in Austin, stop by! Who doesn’t love feminists taking over a bar and rocking the karaoke machine?

Previous SXSW posts:
SXSW 2009: Can Social Media End Racism?
Beating Down Online Misogyny: Links

More to come…