Is today's "fourth wave" feminist movement really a "fifth wave"? We can't understand the inclusiveness, confidence, and playful spirit of today's protest movement without appreciating the wave of community-building that took place in girls' internet fan culture starting around 2000.
Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces (1998) has been sitting in one of my bookcases since 2000. I bought the postcard-sized Semiotext(e) book mostly out of surprise from seeing the name of its author in print: one I realized I hadn’t seen for a very long time and which I didn’t associate with fiction.
It's hard to catch up with the latest episodes in the Strauss-Kahn drama (rumor has it that screenwriters are frantically taking notes to spurt out a series for cable television come September).
The debate heats up in France after a pointed critique of "Le Féminisme à la française" by Joan W. Scott in Libération (06/10/2011). [Edited 07/06/2011]
“It’s our September 11th” confides a socialist supporter to reporters as the news broke that former IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, also known as “DSK,” has been charged for sexual assault and attempted rape in New York. And as for September 11th, there are some in France that are more comfortable imagining fictions of conspiracies than trying to think through the unthinkable.
What does the online speculative realism movement have to offer a conversation about gender and blogging? Easy: several years of experience dealing with intimidation and despair. Whenever you put new stuff out there, you get flak, no matter what your gender.