So this is a freewrite for the blog. We’ll see how much of it gets saved as time goes on.
On Monday night (3/16) I had a volunteer orientation at Bluestockings. Bluestockings, for those who don’t know, is an awesome radical feminist bookstore, entirely volunteer-run, with larger decisions made by a collective.
It was originally opened in the Nineties as Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore and at the time had a more traditional business model, with a woman who owned the place and employees who dealt with day-to-day upkeep. The bookstore was about a third the size that Bluestockings is now. After 9/11, when the entire downtown of Manhattan was shut down, the store’s sales dropped in a time when feminist bookstores were doing poorly all around the country. It was on the verge of closing for good when it was rescued by a woman who renamed it the Bluestockings Bookstore and Activist Center and introduced the collective and volunteer-run model that still exists today.
This was the history that was narrated to us by Rachel, the volunteer coordinator present that night (there are two others), after we had gone around introducing ourselves by name, pronoun, why we wanted to volunteer at Bluestockings, and one thing people might not know about us just by looking. I was at a loss for a few moments at that last, since I (like most people) have a rich internal life, which I’m sure can’t be determined just by looking. I decided to share that I am an immigrant from Ukraine, since people wouldn’t know that not only by looking at me but also by listening to me——my accent when I speak English is purely American.
We talked about the way that shifts work, the listserv we will be added to and how to use it (don’t e-mail everyone if you’re just going to be running 15 minutes late to your shift), the safer space policy, and how we deal with dangerous, triggering, or otherwise harmful situations. The interesting thing to me is that they might ask people who are repeatedly harmful in some way to take a break from going to the space, but they don’t ban people outright. I have mixed feelings about the way that offenders are treated in activist cultures (usually they’re either completely shunned, or insidiously enabled), so other ways of dealing with that are interesting. I think there’s got to be a way to rehabilitate people who cause harm while also acknowledging that the people they harmed might need their absence in order to feel safe. The onus should never be on the survivor/victim/person-who-was-harmed to enter or exit a space depending on whether the harmer’s presence is sufficiently distressing to them. That decision has to be made by the people responsible for a space.
So it’s tough, and I don’t know all the answers, but I’m curious to learn more about how Bluestockings approaches things as I start volunteering there and getting more involved with that community.
Life of a Leaky Pen 