Podcast: Play in new window
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I normally wouldn’t do a podcast about a blog post, but this is a blog post that has been signed by almost 500 people, so it’s not an ordinary blog post. 
You might have heard about Dean Scurry, he’s one of the activists who organised Home Sweet Home, the occupation of Apollo House by the homeless. Dean also set up a podcast last year where he talks to various people, and the title of his podcast is Pow Wow with Dean Scurry. Pow wow, if you remember your John Wayne films is a term associated with American Indians.
Its two main definitions are a North American Indian ceremony involving feasting and dancing, and two, a conference or meeting for discussion, especially among friends or colleagues.
Dean got some criticism from a twitter user called Adele McAlear, who said that he “should know that the name you chose belongs to First Nations culture and is not appropriate”. Dean and others disagreed, and Adele went on to tweet “it would be offensive to use [the term] except in the case of an actual pow-wow which has a specific cultural and spiritual reference.”
One of the people who tweeted on that thread was the novelist Frankie Gaffeny who, a few weeks later, wrote a piece for the Irish times under the title “Identity politics is utterly ineffective at anything other than dividing people”.
In it, he said that, in effect, disputes like these are pointless, that they consume energy that could go into more worthwhile campaigns and that they are based on the false premise categorising people as privileged for narrow reasons, and imposing rules on them for that reason.
The article was widely shared online and it provoked a response that included a post called Cop on Comrades on the blog called Feminist Ire, which was critical, not so much of the article, but of men who shared and commented on the article. The article has been signed by more than 480 women who identify themselves as Irish feminists. Feminist Ire has the tagline Not Your Fluffy Feminism, and one of the first signatories was Sinéad Redmond, whose twitter description includes a mention that she is ‘an angry feminist, [who] … enjoys ruining feminism for everyone’.
