Tuesday, September 8, 2009

NN09: Women Bloggers Found: Has Feminist Blogging Gone Mainstream?

Finally, the video of one of the interesting panels I was on at Netroots Nation has turned up (sorry no transcript). I did discuss the whole dustup over having to rewrite the Blend's TOS. Lots of fun listening to the trials and tribulations of how women who blog often pay much more attention to maintaining civility on their blogs (and seem to be expected to) whereas blogs by men often are a free for all.
Women Bloggers Found: Has Feminist Blogging Gone Mainstream?
Jill Filipovic, Amanda Marcotte, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Lindsay Beyerstein, Pam Spaulding.

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.

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