This article by Emily Nussbaum is probably the best description of Internet feminism I have yet seen.. completely USA-centric though, of course. It is full of great observations – how the Internet provided a platform for more risk-taking and radical areas of feminist speech; how the playful, spontaneous, messy, consciousness-raising nature of feminist blogging resembles some of the more exciting moments of the second wave; and, how this century’s obsession with pop culture is becoming a gateway into feminism for young women.
The whole thing is so well summarised that should you find yourself trying to explain the feminist blogosphere to some Luddite, and getting bored in the process, you can now stare off into the distance for a time and then say, oh, hey I’ll just forward you a link. And if you’re really unlucky they’ll be all what’s a link?
Perhaps more important, these sites inspired an even sharper cadre of commenters, who bonded and argued, sometimes didactically, sometimes cruelly, but just as often pushing one another to hone their ideas—all this from a generation of women written off in the media as uninterested in any form of gender analysis, let alone the label “feminist.” Freed from the boundaries of print, writers could blur the lines between formal and casual writing; between a call to arms, a confession, and a stand-up routine—and this new looseness of form in turn emboldened readers to join in, to take risks in the safety of the shared spotlight.
Ooh, thanks for sharing that.
That always seems to be the deal with meta-discussions of Internet feminism, by and large, doesn’t it? I wonder what a discussion of how the femosphere functions and has developed generally would look like.