Most people-- writers especially-- want to find an audience for their enthusiasms. We write for reaction. Ideally, acclaim and love and good things. Occasionally, even those more negative emotions. Not that I write to anger anyone (we leave that for people who like to start trouble in comment threads), but as far as I'm concerned, as a writer of a blog the only thing more disappointing than a negative reaction is no reaction at all. Since nobody really cares what I have to say about a character who isn't even appearing in comic books anymore, I've gotten kind of used to low hit numbers, no comments, no links and all that.
The biggest reactions I've gotten to Cass-O-Rama have to do with the My Ten Favorite Cassandra Cain Moments post, which I first put on my When Comic Books Ruled the Earth blog and then posted here when I decided to separate my love for Cass Cain comics from my love for ancient comics from another age. In the immediate aftermath of the original post, someone took offense to my feeble jokes about Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake and wrote a rebuttal on her blog. Her readers-- who far outnumber mine-- had a lot of fun tearing me a new asshole over that. Then, just this morning I got another reaction to that post and this time it was from someone who declared it a work of "feminist extremism" because of a single sentence.
It made me think this was 2006 all over again, but only for a moment.
Anyway, the main point of this blog is to celebrate a character I enjoy. While I consider it pretty apolitical, because it's about a female character in a male-biased medium, every so often things will creep into it that reflect my personal views on gender and gender relations, on sexuality and sexual identity. I try to be objective and back things up with facts when I'm making a real-- by "real," I mean historical or non-satirical-- point, but I'm no scholar of these particular topics, having done only a little bit of reading of any academic works about them. Other than that, I've done a little listening to people's concerns about how they're treated. That's about it.
In fact, I consider myself pretty much a neophyte in this kind of thought. There are other blogs and other voices way more advanced in theory than I'll ever be, and much more passionate and involved. And I've touched on LGBTQ issues even fewer times than I've addressed so-called feminist topics. I only occasionally and very briefly write on those subjects and only call out the most obvious examples of dumb things I come across in comics. This is all I feel competent to do, although I have very strong feelings of my own on all of these issues as well.
So I don't feel qualified enough to call myself a feminist or a militant. Thanks for the compliment if you consider me either.
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