Welcome to Feminars!
Feminars' aim is to create a webspace catered towards women (and men) who want to understand the role of feminism in the online world better.
We will also give advice on how they can use online media to promote feminist ideas and contribute to discussions.
Our target demographic will be primarily younger-generation women (similar to us) who have an interest in the changing environment of online feminist discussion.
Our blog is going to give them a medium through which they can explore feminist ideas online, how they're expressed and how they can become a part of the wider online global discussion.
It is a difficult theme to address. There has been discussion that we may be living in a post-feminist society, wherein being a feminist can be confused with being excessively and unnecessarily political. It also raises ideas about post-feminism irony, where facebook groups about women staying in the kitchen are taken lightly, as they are presumed to be plays on 'old-fashioned' anti-feminist beliefs not considered to be popular anymore.
However, post-feminism irony can still incite genuine offence and degradation, as observed in the backlash to an anti-feminist rape joke made by popular comedian Daniel Tosh in July 2012. The joke encouraged many people to take to the Internet, expressing their disapproval of his insistence that it would be funny were a female member of the audience was gang-raped; however, many of the women who retaliated online were bombarded by accusations they were taking things too seriously and to lighten up as it was just a joke. Women's rights online are not well-defined; hence the intense backlash to the strong feminist responses.
So whether we truly are in a post-feminist society (where everything is equal and women should be laughing at jokes about them in the same way men should) or not is up for debate, and something we'll definitely be tackling in our blog.
It's an idea that's already been cleverly explored in the 'Is This Feminist?' tumblr, which has a wonderful sense of humour that we'll definitely be trying to incorporate a similar sense of into our blog. Feminism can be a heavy topic, so we will be utilising light humour in order to lessen this effect.
There are lots of feminist blogs already in existence, and they're definitely inspiring to us in helping us form our vision for Feminars...
- There's LOL-feminist, a blog dedicated solely to jokes and memes relating to feminism, the humour of which we should be incorporating into our blog occasionally.
- The very famous Jezebel site - quite sarcastically funny, but also one of the more timely and news-based feminist blogs.
- And The Dawn Chorus, an Australian-focused feminist blog focused primarily on essays related to current affairs.
The one thing we've noticed missing from these blogs, however, is a specific focus on women online. There's clearly not a shortage of us, as stock images will show:
And that's how Feminars will be different.
We want to examine exactly how women are represented - by others and by themselves - in the online world, as feminist theory can become complicated, especially in the seemingly rule-less environment of the Internet.
We hope that our niche focus and modern topic material will resonate with our demographic, and we will be encouraging their interaction with the blog through mediums appropriate to them, utilising facebook, twitter, comment boxes and polls in order to make this as interactive as we can.
It's about connecting a widespread online audience and capturing their interests in an intelligent, entertaining blog.
It's by women, for women.
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Images courtesy of joe-ks.com and FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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