the feminist librarian reads

I am not just a woman but also a black woman performing a particular type of expertise for large, multiple publics. As such, my experience of negative comments differs from the dominant gendered narrative of online abuse. For example, I have never received a single rape threat. Instead, increased scale and multiple publics (generated by both digital writing and social media) have elicited comments and threats specific to my illegitimacy as an intellectual, e.g. expert. It’s why some form of “who the fuck do you think you are,” as one commenter put it, is the most commonly expressed sentiment among the thousands of negative comments on my blog, As a public writer, academic and black woman, my location at the bottom of a racist, sexist social hierarchy mitigates the presumed returns on academic public engagement specifically and makes a case for reconsidering the theoretical assumptions of microcelebrity more broadly.