Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Tamura Lomax

December 14th, 2012 by Andrea

We’ve seen plenty of changes since then, including leadership and Collective member changes.  I think we began with about ten Collective members.  Of that ten only three remain.  Hortense left the project in December 2011.  I was faced with the choice to either lead the organization alone or to let it die.  The three standing original Collective members stepped up in a huge way during this time and not only asked me to keep The Feminist Wire going, but to help take the lead and share the load in terms of responsibilities.  This shift turned into something really amazing.  We re-grouped and re-organized into a more circular community of peers and have been rocking ever since.

Our Collective and readership have grown by leaps and bounds.  We have gone from approximately 20k monthly readers to 60k, 10 Collective members to 28, 1,856 Facebook likes to almost 9k, etc., in less than 12 months.  However, the thing I’m most proud of is the love and support that we’ve managed to nurture within The Feminist Wire community.  The organization is truly life-giving.  Trust is an essential ingredient.  It’s as significant as a critical feminist gaze.  All Collective members come by way of referral, and they have to be communally approved–at least by my partners, Monica and Darnell, both of which have been helping me to lead The Feminist Wire since December 2011, and me.  We’re fortunate enough to be extremely selective now that we’ve experienced such growth.  Still, we’re always looking for new and amazing feminist voices to add to the chorus, especially as we plan to branch out and do other things on the business front.  There’s a lot in store for us.

The Feminist Wire has done some great series on Black feminism, the latest being about mental health and Black female academics. What are some of the topics that you’re passionate about but has yet to be covered at TFW?   Thank you.  We want to do more forums on academia and health.  However, we want to create space for other marginalized groups, such as women of color and gender non-conforming academics, to speak.  We need to hear their voices.  I’d also love for us to do more work on poverty, pornography, and the prison industry.  Additionally, there’s been quite a bit of work on academics and fashion.  I’d love for us to do more work on fashion and beauty.  The beauty of The Feminist Wire and our current organizational structure is that what gets published is based on the creative juices of the entire Collective.  Folks are always coming up with amazing ideas.  I’m all about creativity, soundness, and production.  If someone has an idea that meets the above criterion–and aligns with both our public and private aims–I’m all for it.

You’ve also gathered quite a few people–mostly people of color–who teach at the university levels at TFW. With the shift in validation of knowledge content-providers–where people with PhDs were held as the paragons of a focused study (a.k.a. experts) to the online world where having a degree may or may not help as far as having expertise–how does TFW navigate and contributing to this new reality?   That’s a great question.  I think we have so many PhD’s due to the kind of work that most of us do: we work in the academy.  However, we’re all critics.  I don’t think any of us believe that we have all the answers and would likely cringe at anyone claiming to be an “expert.”  We’re hell-raisers who sincerely long for a more just society, so our aim is to always be in community with the broader community in which we understand ourselves to merely be a part.  We understand that knowledges are situated and contextual and emerge from a variety of complex spaces—outside of academe.  We’re always in search for and open to the creative genius of our folk.  We’ve also added a few “young feminists” as well.  We want variety.  Our goal is to create space for multiple intersecting and diverging “wires.”

Still, given the reality of knowledge production and social hierarchy–that is, who get’s to be read, heard, tweeted, used in a classroom setting, forwarded, republished at other sites, etc.–often depends on who our readers dub as the “expert.”  So, drawing close this interstice is admittedly quite challenging.

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Posted in Racialicious Crush Of The Week, academia, activism, african-american, black, community, mental health, stereotypes, violence against women, violence against women of colour & indigenous women | Comments Off

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