Women Bloggers Found: Has Feminist Blogging Gone Mainstream?
A few years ago, male bloggers 'round the liberal bloglandia were wondering out loud, "Where are the women bloggers?" Many of the women in the feminist and progressive blogospheres responded with frustration—we were there, and had been, the whole time. Today, the blogosphere looks awfully different, as feminist bloggers are increasingly mainstreamed and able to exert stronger influence on online discourse. But "blogging while feminist" isn't always easy, and feminist bloggers have faced harassment and threats that are uniquely gendered and sexualized. Feminists who have been most successful at running bigger blogs have also been mostly young, white, heterosexual and middle-class—so their issues have been presented to the mainstream progressive movement as the whole of feminism. This panel will look at what has changed, what hasn't and who remains on the edges of progressive blogging. It will also examine how female bloggers—and feminist bloggers in particular—are treated in mainstream spaces, and what we can do about it.
Jill Filipovic is an attorney, blogger and freelance writer. She has been blogging at Feministe for four years, and was formerly the Reproductive Justice editor at AlterNet. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, RH Reality Check, the Huffington Post, and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. Her first contribution to a feminist anthology, "Yes Means Yes: Vicions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape" came out earlier this year.
Amanda Marcotte is a freelance writer and blogger based in Brooklyn after a lifetime of living in Texas. She publishes regularly at Pandagon, RH Reality Check, and Double X, and has written for Slate, Salon, the Guardian, the American Prospect, and the LA Times. She focuses on feminism, monitoring the American right, and having a grand old time doing it.
Samhita has been blogging at Feministing for 4 years. She has a MA in Women's Studies with a focus on political blogging and gender. She has written for New American Media, Wiretap, Colorlines, the Nation and the American Prospect, along with being featured in India Currents Magazine, Nirali Magazine and Alternet. Her focuses include race, gender, popular culture, the romance industry, prisons and activism. She is currently teaching a class at the National Sexuality Resource Center on race, gender and online identities and working on her first book about the romance industry.
Lindsay Beyerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her reporting has appeared in Salon, Slate, The New York Press, In These Times, AlterNet, and other publications. She was the recipient of a 2009 Project Censored Award. Lindsay's photographs have been published in TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Austin American Statesman, and on PBS. She is the author of the Morning Coffee, a daily international news bulletin produced by the UN Foundation's UN Dispatch Blog. Lindsay covered the 2008 presidential election for firedoglake.
North Carolina-based Pam Spaulding is the publisher of PamsHouseBlend.com, named Best LGBT Blog in the 2005 and 2006 Weblog Awards. A regular contributor to Pandagon and The Bilerico Project, Spaulding has guest blogged for Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory on Salon. She received the 2006 Monette-Horwitz Trust Award for making significant contributions toward the eradication of homophobia, and the 2009 Women's Media Center Award for Online Journalism. Spaulding provided commentary on CNN during the 2008 election cycle, and covered the Democratic National Convention. Pam lives in Durham with her wife Kate; they married in Canada in 2004.
