When it comes to community and making money on the web, are queer men more successful at converting communities into cash than queer women?
On Saturday, I particiapted in the Creating Community Through Technology panel as part of the Out On Screen film festival. Aelyn Weissman, a filmmaker and artist, made the observation that of all of us on the panel, the only ones who worked as volunteers for their respective online communites were women (an aside: I was a paid technical consultant for QueerHistoryProject.com) Joe Rachert, promotions manager of InteractiveMale.com, was the only one on the panel who made a living from the community he serves.
After the panel, I chatted with Aerlyn and Elaine Miller of LeatherDyke.com and asked whether they could identify any online communities that were created by and for women that provided a source of income for the site owners or content creators. I offered up BlogHer, but to be honest, I don’t know if anyone associated with BlogHer makes any money at all, and since their association with iVillage, I can’t say what impact, if any, the corporate presence on BlogHer has had on their sense of community. I wracked my brain, but couldn’t come up with any examples of online communities for queer or queer-identified women that were profitable for their owners.
When I spoke to Tara Robertson, the panel organizer, she asked me what my definition of community was. A community is a group of persons organized around a particular center that has a vested interest in being stewards of that community. Community means presence, whether that presence is physical or virtual, and community means participation, however that participation is defined by the individual.
Communities support each other. Communities are a means for individuals to band together with like-minded individuals to solve a particular problem. Communities can be surrogate families, they can be authoritative bodies, but by and large, a community is a living, breathing organism that cannot survive without the care, consideration, and contributions of its members.
If we are to use that definition as a guide, then it’s easy to point to dozens upon dozens of online communities for queer and queer identified women that fit within it. Communities are collectives, and the collective spirit is nothing new to queer women. We’re used to banding together, pooling resources, and making do (or making a way out of no way), but it doesn’t seem that we’re as adept as queer-identified men at mining that collective for dollars.
Joe Rachert spoke proudly and at length about the way the communties at Interactive Male were created with forethought and with the idea of being more community focused, rather than sex focused. Men have to buy memberships to join the service, and a percentage of those funds are given back to the community in the format of charitable donations to LGBT organizations both here in Canada and in the United States. But what of queer women? Are any of us having the same kind of success with our online ventures to this extent? Are we somehow less comfortable with the idea of enterprise and making money off the people we serve that we’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity, not only to generate personal wealth, but to steer some of that wealth into organizations and projects tha benefit our communities in the long run?
I’ve been revisitng some second-wave feminist writings in the last couple of weeks, and came across the Combahee River Collective Statement. In the statement, the women discuss black feminism, racism, sexism, oppression, and revolution, but one particular passage came to mind after yesterday’s discussion:
We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are sociaists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses.
How much of this ideology still informs queer women’s consciousness today? How much of this is the typical reaction to undervalue “women’s work”? I don’t have the answers to these questions, so I’m turning to those of you in the audience for answers, theories, or ideas.
