Jessie Daniels, Professor of Public Health, Hunter College and the Graduate Center

‘Our version of consciousness-raising groups’: Gender, Race and the Political Economy of Feminist Blogging

A New York Magazine cover story (October 30, 2011) recently proclaimed the ‘Rebirth of the Feminist Manifesto’ through feminist blogs. In the article, 20-something feminist blogger, Shelby Knox, described the blogs as her generations’ “version of consciousness-raising groups.” The emergence of digital media, and particularly blogs, represents a crucial new force for civic participation that holds the potential to destabilize old hierarchies, such as gender inequality. Relying on a mixed methodology of online ethnography, content analysis and interviews with bloggers who identify as “feminist” or “womanist,” this explores the implications of these technologies as both offering new forms of contestation around gender by circumventing the traditional gatekeepers of publishing and the ways that they reinforce hegemonic discourses of gender and race, through the rhetoric on the blogs themselves, and through the political economy.