Introduction

So what’s feminist about blogging?

Although not all blogs by women are considered “feminist,” nor are all feminist blogs written by women,¹ the blogosphere is a useful—and necessary—source for feminists both because it allows us to get our perspectives out in public forums, and also because it’s a medium easily adaptable to feminist causes. In the article “An Independent Media Center of One’s Own,” the creators of the Independent Media Center (or Indymedia) note that the open publishing forum offered by Indymedia news Web sites—and also by blogs—embodies feminist values in several ways: it opens up the media-making process to multiple progressive voices; it flattens the hierarchy that exists whenever news is presented as the “active” product separate from the “passive” audience; and it claims not to represent “the monolithic truth but an assembly of many people’s views.”²

In addition to the feminist nature of blogs themselves, contemporary globalization has made the Internet—and blogs in particular—a valuable way for feminists to communicate through and beyond various divides. According to one of our contributors, Gillian Youngs, contemporary feminism, using what’s known as “cyberfeminism,” has been successful in using virtual networks which “cross not only the boundaries of nations and cultures and public and private spheres . . . [but] traditional divisions within them such as state and market, civil and commercial society, profit and non-profit, institutional and personal.” The term cyberfeminism itself is defined as “a diverse range of practices and discourses all generically identifiable by their commitment to exploring non-oppressive alternatives to existing relations of power through manipulation of information technologies.”³ Importantly for the blogging context, cyberfeminists are described as women “for whom information technology, and in particular the Internet, has become a central part of their everyday, lived feminist politics.”⁴ For younger feminists who grew up using the Internet in their daily lives, then, it’s a way to turn the personal into the political in what contributor Tracy Kennedy refers to as “feminist virtual consciousness-raising.”

Without doubt, the cyberfeminism taking place in the blogosphere has broadened the scope of public feminist dialogue and the reach of progressive feminist politics. In setting out to “challenge the male-centered culture of the Internet and to imprint their own models of open and accessible . . . communication onto the new technologies,” these technologically savvy feminists have found a way to introduce new voices and new strategies into age-old feminist debates.⁴ Ideally a powerful communication tool for feminists from Arkansas to Albania, the Internet promises a more open and democratic arena for debate and action, many aspects of which are explored in this edition. That said, there remain serious racial, economic, and even gender gaps—explored in the “where are the women” conversations—in the actual use of the Internet in general⁵ and the blogosphere in particular. We must ask, then, Whose voices are we hearing through this medium, and why?

1. See Ervin’s essay in this edition for her take on the differences between blogs run by women and feminist blogs. [↩]
2. J. Breitbart and A. Nogueira, “An Independent Media Center of One’s Own: A Feminist Alternative to Corporate Media,” in The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism, ed. Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 19-41. [↩]
3. Susan Luckman, “(En)Gendering the Digital Body: Feminism and the Internet,” Hectate 25 (1999): 36-46. Luckman is quoting Sadie Plant, the feminist theorist who coined the term “cyberfeminist.” Importantly, she also notes that, “there exists no singular cyberfeminism per se.” [↩]
4. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
5. See Joni Seager’s The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2003) for global and national statistics. [↩]