June 14, 2010

By young women for young women: Blogging 101

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Melanie @ 9:47 pm

For their final project in WS 30: Women and Pop Culture, this group of young feminists created their own blog and created a film relaying their experiences.

Group statement:

Blogs are quickly becoming one of the main ways that activists are stay in touch and stay updated with current events. And as active readers of blogs- may they be crafting, cooking, or political- we understand the impact that they can have on others. So when it came time to decide what we wanted to do for our group project, a blog made sense.

There are many great blogs dedicated to feminism out there, but there aren’t many written for and by college students. Most of the influential blogs that we read are written by women in their late 20s and beyond. While these are a great resource to the feminist community, it can be difficult to relate to some of the content when you’re still in college and haven’t quite entered the working world yet. Our blog, FemineUs, was designed to fill that gap. We wanted to create a safe space where young feminists could freely discuss their opinions on what was going on in the world.

FemineUs met our goal of creating that safe space. Each of us was able to post about issues that were important to us and other women our age. Some of the posted topics included personal reflections on body image, critical analysis of reality TV, and health issues among others. The readership of our blog spanned continents as we received hits from places such as Iran, South Korea, and New Zealand.

This project was a learning experience for all of us. We hope that the advice we provide in our video will be of use to other feminists looking to start their own blog.

March 19, 2010

We all count

Recently, Kamala Lopez and Tobie Loomis, partners on the ERA Today campaign and the film A Single Woman, visited my classes to discuss the ERA Today campaign and the many large and small ways we can make our voices heard and create change.

The class discussion was electric and we all left feeling empowered and inspired. Kamala and Tobie have continued to dialogue with the class and myself through blogging and email (I’ll blog more on the incredible collaborative outcome in the future). This post is simply to share the following email from Kamala, received yesterday.

I just landed in Dallas where I am presenting the revised version of the ERA short to the Veteran Feminists of America! Tell your class that I used their input from the survey and now Gloria Steinem, who is the keynote speaker is going to be seeing it! I’m going to be blogging the conference for Ms online!
Kamala’s revised presentation of the ERA short to the Veteran Feminists of America in Dallas is a small but powerful reminder that all of our voices count.
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