Feminist Media

From the Second Wave to the Digital Age

By (author) Claire Sedgwick Teaching Associate, University of Nottingham, UK

Publication date:

07 August 2020

Length of book:

160 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Dimensions:

232x161mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781786610409

Feminist Media: From the Second Wave to the Digital Age analyses the relationship between second wave feminist media production and capitalism, as well as identifying the tradition that can be drawn between second wave feminism, Riot Grrrl and feminist blogging today. There has been a recent re-evaluation of the importance of second wave feminist media, demonstrated by the digitization of Spare Rib by the British Library in 2015. However, up until now, research on the magazine has been limited.

This book analyses the relationship between Spare Rib and the capitalist publishing industry, comparing it to American feminist magazine Ms. The book argues that it is important to understand the cultural economies of the magazines as this had an impact on the assumed readership of the magazines, therefore having an impact on the issues that were privileged. The second half of the book charts a crucial and often overlooked link between feminist media production in the ‘second wave’ and more contemporary forms of feminist media activism.

1. Introduction: Second Wave Feminism Media and its Contemporary Relevance / Part I: The Economics of Feminist Magazines / 2. Constructing the Reader / 3. Advertising Feminism: Negotiating Economics and Activism / Part II: Feminist Magazines and Historicizing the Second Wave / 4. Representing Race / 5. Pornography and the Politics of Sex / 6. Political Engagement in Spare Rib and Ms. / Part III: After the ‘Second Wave’ / 7. Riot Grrrl / 8. Feminist Digital Media / Conclusion

Rather than a mere surface-level content analysis, Feminist Media engages feminist critical discourse analysis to read the absences within [feminist] publications, including what they did not cover or covered only peripherally (namely race, politics, and pornography). This allows Sedgwick to nuance established histories of Second Wave feminism that can stereotype the movement as a politically radical, but uniform, group…. Sedgwick’s analysis is useful for historians of feminist media (and of the larger feminist movement), media historians studying magazines, and cultural and Marxist media scholars who seek to understand how media publications work against yet within capitalism. The extensive archival work uncovered a range of dissenting and competing viewpoints on many of the Second Wave’s principal concerns (including race, radical politics, sex work, and pornography), which challenges existing histories that homogenize that era of feminism. Sedgwick uses those discoveries to make a larger call to maintain physical and digital archives so future scholars can return to original material rather than rely on tomorrow’s established histories.