Revolution

Tonight I have the opportunity to talk about blogs, feminism and the Web 2.0 revolution at Barnard University's Center for Research on Women, and frankly, I'm quite excited.

You see, I've been in panel after panel where "blog experts" throw around platitudes about how blogs are revolutionary, yet nobody seems to be able to explain why. I can't even remember hearing someone like Joe Trippi explain it ... and he's written a whole book about it! (The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything)

So the question that hangs always in conferences like Blogging and Feminism : (Web)sites of resistance is, what are we calling a revolution and what is it exactly about blogs that made the revolution happen in the first place.

I have been thinking about this long and hard for a while. Actually, a few years. And every time I look at the actual structure of blog software, I end up going back to the ideas of "tricks of the weak" or Tretas del debil described by Josefina Ludmer's seminal analysis of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. In that article she describes how Sor Juana Ines uses her spaces of weakness --whether they be the nunnery, the kitchen or even the imposition of silence-- to defy the social, political and religious order that demanded of her not to have knowledge, not to express knowledge and, in the process, not to gain Power.