A Thousand Splendid Reasons to Use Social Media

I love that we are all posting on this blog, because I feel that there are so many of us writing about feminism (albeit in different genres and areas of feminism) that I think we can still help one another out with our writing in terms of feminist literary theory.  For example, Morgan's post discusses post-colonialism and feminism; Tori's post discusses two female characters that are not in control of their environment; I remember Sally saying she wanted to discuss feminism in Jane Eyre on Digital Dialogue, although I'm not sure if that is still the direction she wanted to go.  Likewise, I want to discuss how male authors are the strongest writers in feminist literary theory, because people are more likely to take a male author seriously (especially in Carroll's Victorian England, or in Khaled Hosseini's 1980 to present-day Afghanistan.)

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Social Media is a fantastic new way to communicate and circulate ideas.  I was discussing my thesis with my "homie" Will, who is on tumblr, and he directed me here: I need feminism because J. K. Rowling... .  This short post has been reblogged 12,000+ times and I had never thought about this before, but I feel that something like this strengthens my argument that male writers are more powerful in feminism than female writers.  Harry Potter is also something that could be viewed as slightly feminism (let's be real; without Hermione's intellect and cleverness, Harry would have died multiple times).  But the reason this is significant is because even now, most people refer to JK Rowling as JK Rowling; not Joanne Rowling or Jo Rowling.  In the beginning, no one would have taken a female writer seriously; to make her more masculine, the publishing company had her use her initials (Her only real initial is J for Joanne; the publishing company made her choose another one, so she chose "K," for her grandmother Kathleen.)  There are many other examples of this in Victorian England (the Brontë sisters used male names when they originally published their novels).

With this in mind, I was able to rewrite my thesis: Male authors are the most powerful in the feminist literary movement, as it is male authors that people take the most seriously; in Victorian England, Lewis Carroll wrote about a young girl that broke all social norms; in A Thousand Splendid Suns, it was Khaled Hosseini, a male author in a Middle Eastern culture, that wrote about the oppression of women.  Ironically enough, this shows why feminism is necessary: until women can write about their own problems and be taken seriously, the women of the world will almost always certainly have to rely on men to be the journalists and authors of their inequality.