Posts tagged with 'Feminism'
[For background on what AmazonFAIL is, see my article at the Women's Media Center.]
As the day has worn on, more parts of the story are unfolding, and all these little tidbits at the intersection of tech, culture, media and commerce are more than fascinating. This is the kind of story that sends me down the rabbit hole of musing for days.
Let’s start with the tech side of things
According to Jessica Valenti (and her publisher, Seal Press), Amazon reps are claiming that this is a purely internal issue caused by the mysteriously “glitch” spoken of last night. I don’t think the reps know what they’re talking about, frankly. What I think is going on: there is a severe vulnerability in the Amazon flagging-for-inappropriate system, and it’s been found and exploited by one or more nerds with too much time on their hands. Amazon’s mistake, vis a vis the brave new world of social media, is two-fold:
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Last weekend was the last of my three sessions with the Progressive Women’s Voices program… and while I’m excited to run out into the world with the stacks of knowledge that I gained, I’m sad that it was our last class! Here’s our group with the staff of the Women’s Media Center, plus a certain famous lady that helps make it all happen:
Bonus: I also played superfangrrl and got my picture taken with Jane Fonda.
As many of you know, I was accepted into the first 2009 class of the Progressive Women’s Voices program. I’ve been through the first of three weekend trainings, and I cannot say enough good things about the program and the women who run it: it’s part boot-camp, part summer camp and part group therapy. I thought I was pretty media savvy before I went into this, but I’ve been blown away with the amount of material I’ve learned so far, and how much it’s already shaped the work I’m doing.
In short, every woman I know should apply for this program. The deadline for applications to get into the next round of classes is coming soon: March 10. Women from all disciplines, backgrounds and identities are strongly encouraged to apply! Don’t let geography or other constraints prevent you from applying — the staff is more than willing to work with candidates that get accepted. This is one of the most brilliant programs for empowering women with real skills that I’ve ever seen– get your application in today.
I’ve talked about this before, and it just came up in the conversation I was having a few minutes ago… but I’ve got a linguistic bone to pick with using the word “women” as an adjective– as in, “women journalists,” “women bloggers.”
Whenever you do that, you are stating that the default gender for that job is male, and you need to add a qualifier before it to make it female. Can we all now, together, say that “women” should only be a noun? I know the dictionary has an adjective entry for it, but sometimes dictionaries are stupid.
Do you want your daughter to be an adjective or a non when she grows up?
If you want to refer to women who are doing a particular job, say, “women who are bloggers,” or “women who are journalists.” I know it’s longer and a little more cumbersome, but it makes women the actors and agents of the situation.
This has been a public service announcement from the nerdy linguistic department of Deanna’s brain. Please commence enjoying your weekend now.
I’ve been bouncing off the walls since I got the official word, and now I can finally broadcast it in every medium: I’ve been accepted into the first class of this year’s Progressive Women’s Voices program! Here’s a brief description of this killer training that I’ll be receiving:
We are "changing the conversation" by making sure that there are plenty of qualified, authoritative, progressive women experts available to editors, reporters, producers, and bookers. For the women chosen to participate in our 2009 Progressive Women's Voices program, we provide intense media training sessions in New York, with weekly follow-up briefings and continued training, as well as support and resources for media bookings.
Not only am I thrilled to be participating myself, but I’m especially excited to work with amazing classmates — Rinku Sen, Jehmu Greene, hello! — and almuni of the program (Carmen, Courtney, I’m lookin’ at you…). Thanks to the Women’s Media Center for giving us all this fabulous program.
It’s Launch Madness here at DZ HQ, and this particular project is an issue near and dear to my heart. I can’t really say it better than the organizers, so, from http://thisiswhatwomenwant.com:
Tired of being talked about this election season? Done with being represented by skewed polls and stereotypes?
This is your chance to cut through the spin and tell the media, the candidates and the world exactly what you want this election season, both right here online and live in cities across the country this Fall.
Oh. Freakin’. Yeah. There were a lot of interesting technical challenges for the project: how to get WordPress to take anonymous submissions, how to make the site as managable and geek-free by the end users as possible, and so much more. Can’t wait to rip this election season up!
For the last few years, I’ve been struggling with where I find myself on a political spectrum. Sure, I’m on the left. I call myself a progressive and feminist. I know that I’ve grown more than distasteful of electoral politics (which once interested me fairly significantly), and that Hurricane Katrina was the moment that I threw up my hands in complete frustration and rage at the general state of affairs. I’ve dabbled in arts activism, local community organizing, sociolinguistics education, feminist activism, tech empowerment, you name it. None of it seems to singly suit me anymore, and most of it angers me. I’ll say it: I have anger issues. Hello, my name is Deanna, I have anger issues. (That one was for my therapist, everyone wave at her– she’s back there in the corner, waving back at you all.)
More than anything, I’ve been a bridge-builder for most of my political career. I come from working class, conservative roots, and I have been fueled in the past by a passion to build understanding between worlds that don’t talk to each other. A lot of that has to do with the tight relationship that I have with my folks; I find myself wondering how they would react to things that I’m working on, or how a particular issue is framed. Far more than I do now I often used them as guinea pigs: Pop’s the hard-line conservative, Mom’s our swing voter.
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Shameless self-promotion, because I’m honored to be included in an article with so many stellar women of the media world — check out Adele Stan’s fantastic writeup on women making media: Thanks, We’ll Make Our Own Media.
no no, thank YOU, Adele!
A crazy time here in Deannaland. I was in Cambridge this past weekend for the annual Best-Conference-Ever: Women, Action and the Media. I did double-presentation duty once again, sitting on Jenn Pozner’s panel about women, feminism and blogging, and then did my workshop on “Empowering Online Communities.” (See the presentation and the followup materials here.)
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What Gerald Ford said about her: “if God created the world in 6 days, he couldn’t have rested on the 7th day– he would have had to explain it to Helen Thomas.”
