HUHO: Help Us Help Ourselves - a Feminist Community Internet Project

Well, the first round of HUHO is closed and has been compiled, I think this was an ingenious idea put together by Lauren of Faux Real. *applause*

The idea is to get everyone to share what they can about areas of their interest/knowledge, in order to fit a shoestring budget. A skills database essentially, brought to you by feminists of ALL stripes and their allies. I think this idea is especially brilliant because of it's potential to share both personal and emotional knowledge so seldom reproduced in society. You might get a 'distanced' kind of learning from self-help books, magazines, etc...but it's depersonalized, removed and authoritarian (usually facilitates to reproduce the status quo not to counter it). It's really quite ironic that despite so much "self-help" and so many make-over shows and shit available, we're all a bit more miserable and always need more self-help and make-overs and shit.

IMO - it's precisely this distancing from personal experiences that allows for this. The personal has transformed from being a source of "knowledge" into being a "spectacle". We take the personal to be distrustful and so we laugh at it, but then we trust some dickwad who's great at dispensing cracker-jack philosophy and trust him (usually someone who's trying to sell us a something) - while we distance ourselves from each other...Coming from an Indian background - I can attest that what my grandmother says isn't assumed to be 'quackery', but rather needs to be 'respected', cherished and believed. When I say this, I'm not talking about 'traditions', I'm talking pragmatically about 'experiential knowledge'.

Okay, I've rambled too much.

Anyways - check out the great tips from everything to child-rearing, tasty recipes to how to take advantage of public transport.

From now on, I'm adding a HUHO category to my blog - anything that is 'accessible, affordable or useful' will be put into this category.

Read more here. (My contributions so far: Cheap Cough Syrup and Depression Advice)