Jane Puts It in a Box

Making Feminist Media provides new ways of thinking about the vibrant media and craft cultures generated by Riot Grrrl and feminism’s third wave. It focuses on a cluster of feminist publications—including BUST, Bitch, HUES, Venus Zine, and Rockrgrl—that began as zines in the 1990s. By tracking their successes and failures, this book provides insight into the politics of feminism’s recent past. Making Feminist Media brings together interviews with magazine editors, research from zine archives, and analysis of the advertising, articles, editorials, and letters to the editor found in third-wave feminist magazines. It situates these publications within the long history of feminist publishing in the United States and Canada and argues that third-wave feminist magazines share important continuities and breaks with their historical forerunners. These publishing lineages challenge the still-dominant—and hotly contested— wave metaphor categorization of feminist culture. The stories, struggles, and strategies of these magazines not only represent contemporary feminism, they create and shape feminist cultures. The publications provide a feminist counter-public sphere in which the competing interests of editors, writers, readers, and advertisers can interact. Making Feminist Media argues that reading feminist magazines is far more than the consumption of information or entertainment: it is a profoundly intimate and political activity that shapes how readers understand themselves and each other as feminist thinkers.

In the length of time from Gloria Steinem to Courtney Love, young feminists have grown up with a plethora of cultural choices and images. In THIRD WAVE AGENDA, feminists born between the years 1964 and 1973 discuss the things that matter NOW, both in looking back at the accomplishments and failures of the past--and in planning for the challenges of the future. 10 halftones.

"Chris Bobel is a careful ethnographer, respectful of research participants, and while she clearly takes a stand on menstrual activism, she handily defends her proposition that feminism is `finding its balance between reliving its past and creating its future.' Bobel's work, which includes incisive analysis of how third-wave, activists incorporate and update tactics and strategies of the second wave, will be a welcome addition to the scholarship of feminism." Elizabeth Kissling, author of Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation --

In the 1990s, American televison audiences witnessed an unprecedented rise in programming devoted explicitly to women. Cable networks such as Oxygen Media, Women's Entertainment Network, and Lifetime targeted a female audience, and prime-time dramatic series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Judging Amy, Gilmore Girls, Sex and the City, and Ally McBeal empowered heroines, single career women, and professionals struggling with family commitments and occupational demands. After establishing this phenomenon's significance, Amanda D. Lotz explores the audience profile, the types of narrative and characters that recur, and changes to the industry landscape in the wake of media consolidation and a profusion of channels. Employing a cultural studies framework, Lotz examines whether the multiplicity of female-centric networks and narratives renders certain gender stereotypes uninhabitable, and how new dramatic portrayals of women have redefined narrative conventions. Redesigning Women also reveals how these changes led to narrowcasting, or the targeting of a niche segment of the overall audience, and the ways in which the new, sophisticated portrayals of women inspire sympathetic identification while also commodifying viewers into a marketable demographic for advertisers.

Young women today have benefited from the strides made by grassroots social activists in the 1960s and 1970s, yet they are hesitant to identify themselves as feminists and seem apathetic about carrying the torch of older generations to redress persistent sexism and gender-based barriers. Contesting the notion that we are in a post-feminist age, this provocative collection of original essays identifies a third wave of feminism. The contributors argue that the next generation needs to develop a politicized, collective feminism that both builds on the strategies of second wave feminists and is grounded in the material realities and culture of the twenty-first century. Organized in five sections that mirror the stages of consciousness-raising, this is an engaging, often edgy, look at a broad range of perspectives on the diversity, complexity, multiplicity, and playfulness of the third wave. It is also a call to action for new voices to redefine a feminism that is not only personally aware but also politically involved.

"Updated and with a new preface by the authors."--Cover.