Analytics Consent

We use analytics to understand better how people are using this site.

Permit Google Analytics?

Yes No
Skip to main content
Read page text
page 76
The Revolution Will Be Feminised As a digitally empowered new generation use the online world to reinvent youth culture, Zing Tsjeng talks to the young women at the vanguard of a new wave of feminism In 2014, digital feminism is at a crossroads. “Online feminism: is it really helping?” wonders the Huffington Post. “Nipples, banknotes and internet trolls,” rages the Telegraph. “Is this seriously the best feminism can do?” Meanwhile, columnists endlessly debate the feminist credentials of Miley, Rihanna and Beyoncé, as if discovering a lone feminist in music might somehow eradicate the wage gap. But beyond the vajazzle-ntwerk concerns of sensational media outlets, an underground of young feminists is thriving online. You just have to know where to look. “The age of having a few feminist representatives is over,” argues Reni Eddo-Lodge (above right), a full-time campaigner and writer who has been blogging about feminism and race for over four years. “When I started getting involved in feminism, all the texts recommended to me were by white women. The internet fundamentally changed that – it’s provided a platform for voices that you simply would not have read before.” Feminism has always been inextricably linked to developments in technology. Thanks to mass printing, suffragettes at the start of the 20th century were able to cheaply produce newspapers like Votes for Women, which they sold or left on public transport in the hope of converting curious readers to their cause. During the glory years of 70s counterculture, underground periodicals like Spare Rib offered an unvarnished alternative to preening glossies like Cosmopolitan. In the 90s, riot grrrls adopted the self-publish-and-be-damned spirit of punk fanzines like Maximum Rocknroll, penning intensely personal and political takes on eating disorders, sexism and body image, and the unfiltered and uncensored thoughts and dreams of thousands of young women were endlessly Xeroxed, posted and swapped at zine fairs. In 1991, Australian art collective VNS Matrix published the utopian “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century", a viral poster image warning “big daddy mainframe” that, in the digital world, “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.” As English author Sadie Plant said in 1993: “Cyberfeminism is simply the recognition that patriarchy is doomed.” Australia's Rosie X founded the world’s first cyberfeminist zine, Geekgirl, in 1993. Its motto? “Grrrls need modems!" The new online wave of feminist and female-only collectives and zines channels Geekgirl's DIY ethos. Crucially, this generation of feminist writers and artists have grown up online; some are old enough to remember the crackle of a modem, while for others GeoCities is an archaic fossil from the early 00s. And they’re networking, @-ing, RT-ing and reblogging each other. Across geographical distances, they’re working out what unites them more than what divides them. Julia Gray and Bryony Beynon (closing spread, centre) are the founders of anti-harassment campaign Hollaback London. Beynon remembers the dial-up days well: “Growing up in isolated south Wales, I was part of the first generation of teenage girls to create social worlds for themselves on the internet. It exposed me to a dizzying array of ideas about politics, identity, sexuality and gender I would never have come across otherwise.” Dazed & Confused 76
page 77
Despite the popularity of highprofile feminist campaigns such as No More Page 3 and Everyday Sexism, there is still much to change. In 2013, women in the UK earned almost £5,000 less than their male counterparts, according to TUC analysis. An audit of over 100 galleries in London found that only five per cent exhibited an equal number of male and female artists. Since 2010, feminist literature organisation Vida has kept track of how male writers are disproportionately represented – and reviewed – in major publications like The New York Times. It’s not looking too good. “There are so many maledominated places where women aren’t allowed to feel comfortable,” says photographer Arvida Byström (right), who runs Gal Space, a pink-floored, female-run gallery in east London. “It’s not spoken aloud, like, ‘This is a male-only place,’ even though it is. Females need their spaces to talk, to get together, to realise they’re not being fucking paranoid (about sexism).” Increasingly, that space exists virtually. Women constitute the majority of users on social networks like Twitter and Facebook – Brian Solis, who has mapped online gender representation for Information is Beautiful, goes as far as calling these sites “matriarchies”. According to comScore, an internet analytics company, women in Europe and North America spend 30 per cent more time on these socially oriented sites than their male counterparts. On average, they also tweet more, follow more people and have more followers. They include Nottingham-born Beth Siveyer (far left), who founded the feminist zine Girls Get Busy. “I’m not particularly academic – I haven’t even been to university,” she says. “I actually first searched the ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist art’ tags on Tumblr and I think seeing the diverse volume of content is truly what gave me confidence to identify as a feminist and inspired me to start GGB.” Her story isn’t too far off from that of Eddo-Lodge, who recalls “tapping in something like ‘UK feminism’ into Google” when she came across feminism during an English class at university. Say what you want about the #annoying ubiquity of hashtags and Google’s all-seeing eye, but both have indexed knowledge that is accessible in ways that were unthinkable a few decades ago. Now on its 20th issue, Girls Get Busy has expanded into a 10,000-follower-strong online platform that distributes other zines and supports female-identified artists, musicians and writers. “The sort of feminism you see celebrated in the media is very one-way – it’s hetero, white, middle-class feminism,” she explains. “But now we can make our own media.” Girls Get Busy is just one of the numerous feminist projects thriving online – there’s south London’s SALT., which blends critical theory with visual art, Brooklyn-based zine Illuminati Girl Gang, Petra Collins’ visual arts platform The Ardorous, the literary journal tender, New York musicmeets-art zine The Le Sigh... Even a commercial undertaking like Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie runs on explicitly feminist ideals, publishing articles pondering “if only there were a 12-step programme for misogynists” alongside how-to instructionals for DIY ruffle socks. “Blogs are free,” explains Gabby Bess, founder of Illuminati Girl Gang. “Websites are like, $10. Illuminati Girl Gang started out Dazed & Confused 77

Page Text

View plaintext

The Revolution Will Be Feminised

As a digitally empowered new generation use the online world to reinvent youth culture, Zing Tsjeng talks to the young women at the vanguard of a new wave of feminism

In 2014, digital feminism is at a crossroads. “Online feminism: is it really helping?” wonders the Huffington Post. “Nipples, banknotes and internet trolls,” rages the Telegraph. “Is this seriously the best feminism can do?” Meanwhile, columnists endlessly debate the feminist credentials of Miley, Rihanna and Beyoncé, as if discovering a lone feminist in music might somehow eradicate the wage gap. But beyond the vajazzle-ntwerk concerns of sensational media outlets, an underground of young feminists is thriving online. You just have to know where to look.

“The age of having a few feminist representatives is over,” argues Reni Eddo-Lodge (above right), a full-time campaigner and writer who has been blogging about feminism and race for over four years. “When I started getting involved in feminism, all the texts recommended to me were by white women.

The internet fundamentally changed that – it’s provided a platform for voices that you simply would not have read before.”

Feminism has always been inextricably linked to developments in technology. Thanks to mass printing, suffragettes at the start of the 20th century were able to cheaply produce newspapers like Votes for Women, which they sold or left on public transport in the hope of converting curious readers to their cause. During the glory years of 70s counterculture, underground periodicals like Spare Rib offered an unvarnished alternative to preening glossies like Cosmopolitan.

In the 90s, riot grrrls adopted the self-publish-and-be-damned spirit of punk fanzines like Maximum Rocknroll, penning intensely personal and political takes on eating disorders, sexism and body image, and the unfiltered and uncensored thoughts and dreams of thousands of young women were endlessly Xeroxed, posted and swapped at zine fairs.

In 1991, Australian art collective VNS Matrix published the utopian “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century", a viral poster image warning “big daddy mainframe” that, in the digital world, “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.” As English author Sadie Plant said in 1993: “Cyberfeminism is simply the recognition that patriarchy is doomed.” Australia's Rosie X founded the world’s first cyberfeminist zine, Geekgirl, in 1993. Its motto? “Grrrls need modems!"

The new online wave of feminist and female-only collectives and zines channels Geekgirl's DIY ethos. Crucially, this generation of feminist writers and artists have grown up online; some are old enough to remember the crackle of a modem, while for others GeoCities is an archaic fossil from the early 00s. And they’re networking, @-ing, RT-ing and reblogging each other. Across geographical distances, they’re working out what unites them more than what divides them.

Julia Gray and Bryony Beynon (closing spread, centre) are the founders of anti-harassment campaign Hollaback London. Beynon remembers the dial-up days well: “Growing up in isolated south Wales, I was part of the first generation of teenage girls to create social worlds for themselves on the internet. It exposed me to a dizzying array of ideas about politics, identity, sexuality and gender I would never have come across otherwise.”

Dazed & Confused 76

Read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content