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I wrote an email to a fashion blogger/etsy seller

baruchandroll:

whose blog I really like, about why she chooses not to feature people of colour or fat people or other marginalized bodies particularly often. She responded that she didn’t want to justify her content choice with me. Fair enough. I sent her one last email back, which I thought I might share with y’all, since I think it articulates why I feel like this kinda thing is important.

I didn’t email because I want other people to do things solely so they live up to my satisfaction! I don’t want to make you feel like you have to justify yourself to me. As a chubby white lady, I am mainstream enough to not be excluded by your blog. It’s the other folks who the fashion industry (not just you) tend to make invisible that I was thinking of when I wrote. I suppose I wrote to you because I was curious about whether or what you thought about this particular aspect of your branding/posting/styling.

As I said, I think that good-hearted, well-intentioned, perfectly intelligent folks like yourself aren’t obligated to change their lives or their friends or where they live to meet some sort of diversity ideal. What I was suggesting, I suppose, was that when you include content that focusses around other designers/models/bodies/places that there is an opportunity, if you were so inclined, to be more inclusive.

And it isn’t a secret that of course I think that it is problematic that, fashion-related content that only showcases thin, feminine, white women as if they are the target market or only possible candidates for beauty or fashion, both because it really narrows down who can see themselves as potential buyers for your shop, but also because having an overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly thin image of the fashion industry (I realize I am talking about not just you but the entire monolithic thing) has negative effects on all kinds of folks. It is my not-so-secret wish that smaller brands and bloggers might want to challenge, not reinforce, those standards, which I do think are oppressive. I am not naive enough to think that you won’t have heard these types of arguments before.

Finally, I hope you do know that the reason it matters to me enough to email is that I think in a lot of cases what you do is great, and that you have worked really hard to gain the attention of a lot of folks in a pretty-saturated fashion/etsy/blog community. My wish was mostly that you could bring more people along with you. As someone who is pretty engaged with anti-oppressive work, online and off, I don’t feel like talking this way is necessarily “getting into an argument”, more that it can be interesting and important to talk about these things, even (and especially) in contexts that aren’t traditionally political, like fashion blogs. But I realize that you didn’t invite me to start this conversation, so I respect that you don’t want to have it right now.

I have found and do read a lot of blogs by many folks out there that are a lot more well-rounded and inclusive in terms of racial/sexual/fatness/class issues. And I suppose that’s why I really notice now when other bloggers don’t make that choice in terms of content, since there is so much great stuff out there that seems relatively easy to find.

I wanna say, though, that to me, email is a medium where folks feel like what they say is private, which is why I’m not saying who this is or a lot of detail about their response (or even the first email I sent that this person was responding to.) As such, I want to respect that privacy, and not start a fashion-blogger witch hunt.

But, since it seems that there isn’t going to be any sort of discussion with the person in question, I thought that the folks who follow this blog might have things to say about this phenomenon in general.

Being on tumblr and following really smart people like you has really opened my eyes to being more inclusive as a blogger. I really don’t think I have reached the Ultimate Dizzying Heights of Inclusive Bloggerlyness, because I have a lot of my own ignorance to challenge yet, but just being exposed to so many amazing points of view has been incredible.

So thank you Iris, and every other person I follow on tumblr.


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