What #twittersilence has to do with intersectionality.

Days after the #twittersilence campaign spearheaded by Caitlin Moran, twitter remains saturated with critiques about how misguided it was along with the occasional jokes mocking its perceived silliness. First, there were those who discounted Caitlin Moran's campaign as nonsense due to her personal beliefs, presumably derived from various tweets she's posted, mostly between two and four years ago as captured in this Storify here. I won't even get into the problems inherent in taking isolated statements out of context that someone made over four years ago and using that to articulate some sort of statement about their beliefs. Suffice it to say, I call bullshit on that one.

But there were those who actually were concerned with the overall message Caitlin Moran was conveying. Zerlina Maxwell said "#Twitter silence is what happens when people with privilege try to pretend like they don't have it. Really misguided and unhelpful." Many feminists, particularly feminists of color took issue with Caitlin Moran's stance because they were aware of the painful struggle women of color and poor women have had with the feminist movement. Women of color have fought to expand the bounds of a feminism that insists that women are a homogenous group and that the experience (and oppression thereof) of all women can be defined by women who are white and middle class. Feminists of color are deeply concerned with uncovering and exposing the different ways in which women are oppressed and the various axes of oppression. This intersectionality theory and methodology is necessary to in order to fully grasp how women experience the world and requires simultaneously an uncovering and ownership of privilege. Thus goes the critics, Caitlin Moran, a white woman with the privilege of being white, didn't understand that calling for women to silence themselves came from a position of privilege: that is, only someone who has a voice and can be heard has the power and ability to be silent. Only to someone who has been heard does silence have any power.

Now, as a feminist who is a black woman and a black woman who believes that the examination of oppression must be intersectional, I agree that Caitlin Moran certainly has privilege. At the very least, she has white and ableist privilege. She may have class privilege as well. But that isn't really the point I don't think because #twittersilence was never about silencing women in the face of oppression to begin with. #Twittersilence was effectively a boycott. Against twitter. As a way to shall we say, entice the big whigs at Twitter to take more proactive steps to protect women from abuse and rape threats they receive daily on Twitter. Something more than a "report abuse" button that is. And despite the fact that Caitlin Moran and others joining the campaign reiterated this fact several times, people still insisted that silencing is about privilege and silence does nothing to stop the abuse from happening. In other words, keeping your mouth shut isn't going to stop the misogynists and women-hating trolls from sending women rape threats. But again, the campaign for silence wasn't meant to stop the trolls per se; it was a strategy employed to send a message to Twitter that something more must done, that Twitter, the entity, the organization, cannot stand idly by while women-hating trolls utilize its platform to subject women to rape threats and other forms of abuse deeply rooted in misogyny and racism ('cause yeah some of those threats had very racist elements as well).

What could have been an effective strategy was shut down by many not because it wasn't inclusive enough. If you understood that it was a boycott directed AT Twitter we can move on from that point. #Twittersilence didn't have the impact it could have because we insisted that Caitlin Moran wasn't recognizing and owning her privilege and that she wasn't advocating an intersectional brand of feminism. We were so caught up in what kind of feminist Caitlin Moran was that we couldn't see what she was actually DOING. If an aim of intersectionality is to accurately describe the different perspectives that impact that ways in which women experience the world, then intersectional feminists should also understand that from Caitlin Moran's perspective, a boycott was a useful (and has been historically) and effective strategy. And not necessarily misguided. As intersectional feminists, we must try to understand ALL women and their brand of feminism, not just advocate ours.