Month: April 2023

I have built a website/web magazine called The New Feminist Perspective. This functions like a blog with a section for public discussion and somewhere that people can post about their personal experiences with intersectional issues. While I am the only person to post (SO FAR) I have many more ideas for posts and I have reached out to some friends of mine to write pieces to add to the site. One of my friends is a Navy Veteran and gay, yet she was sexually harassed many times over her Naval career and was put into many bad situations. When I discussed writing a piece for the site with her she was almost bursting with information and was so eager to share. I am really proud that I have been able to create a place where she can share her experiences for her own mental health and maybe even help someone going through a similar circumstance be seen.  

 

Yet, The New Feminist Perspective is more than a blog, there are book recommendations and so much room to grow. I want to eventually add a news page and a page that will allow people to connect with local activist organizations. As I said on the site “The New Feminist Perspective is designed to uplift marginalized voices. Feminism has become a dirty word and has been warped ideologically to more closely resemble misandry than equality. It is the goal of the New Feminist Perspective to bring inclusivity and an intersectional framework back into mainstream feminism”.  It’s hard to assess if this is really making a difference or an impact, I think that at the least this has become a place where people can vent their issues and frustrations and that is a valuable thing. I am the moderator but I have set rules for myself when I do start getting some potential posts, I am really hoping to be able to bring inclusive representation to the table. At the most this could become a source that is able to shift the perception of feminism back to an inclusive and equal framework. I knew for this assignment I wanted to focus on intersectionality and the focus of feminism on white upper class women has always rubbed me the wrong way because I was taught that feminism is equality. This assignment allowed me to roll both of those ideas into one forum where people can share and have their experiences heard. It’s also a place where people can go to better understand and empathize with others. I feel as a white woman a lot of us have had to take a step back and ask ourselves to check our biases and this is a place where we can learn and educate ourselves.  

I will have to figure out how to get the domain name though. I don’t want this to stay as my URL but here is the current URL for The New Feminist Perspective. I am so so so proud of this site and what I was able to build here. Please I want all the feedback!!

https://elizabetheschlumbo.wixsite.com/mysite

 

The issues that really resonate with me have to do with intersectionality. Growing up in Southern California in such a diverse environment, I have learned that I have an immense amount of privilege that can be put to use. I want to create a local zine. My plan is to allow anyone to submit articles or writings that speak to issues of identity, marginalization, and overall tiredness with the culture in the US. I feel like giving people an outlet and a platform to speak will take a lot of stress out of daily life and allow people to voice their opinions in a public forum without fear of reprisal. Sometimes it feels like we are all screaming into an echo chamber that has no end, so focusing in and creating a place for self expression is what I would love to create. We see on social media how creators of color are much more likely to be “shadow banned” or have their access restricted due to how content is cultivated and the value put on certain creators. We see time and time again a lack of POC creators not because they aren’t there but because they aren’t promoted, especially if they speak about activism, social, or cultural issues. I feel like this zine could be a place where people can be seen and heard, as well as a place to grow and build on ideas. 

I want to execute this online. I don’t want to allow free posting so I will need to cultivate the content, or pay someone else to. Luckily, my sister is a software engineer so I can have her help me with the technological and logistical side of this project. But the overall plan is to have a few friends contribute to the zine and maybe advertise on our social media so that we can get people writing in. Once we have works to choose from we can start matching works that have similar themes and cultivate different zines. It will probably be on a quarterly system so four a year but we can have as many writers and contributors as we want. I hope to not only accept writing but artwork and poetry as well, as long as it fits with the themes of identity, marginalization, and oppression by the US culture. I personally have a piece I have been writing for a few weeks about Food Deserts in the US and how 19 million Americans currently live in a Food Desert.  

My plan is to give a platform. I want people to be able to write in or send in their work and be heard, I want them to see their work online on this platform and feel like they were able to reach an audience. So many people have amazing ideas and commentary on popular culture and cultural issues that I want them to be heard. As a student I have so many ideas and I have been working on them for a few years now but there aren’t many spaces where I am heard due to my inexperience. I recently attended the OAH (Organization of American Historians) conference in LA and so many of the topics that were disguised were topics I have thought long and hard about. It was a vindicating experience to see them describe 4th wave feminism seen through social media and these cultural movements like Me Too and BLM are mainly held on social media platforms. I have been saying this since 2015 that this is the direction for feminism and I have been told many times that I was wrong. I WASN’T WRONG!! But it wasn’t until more educated women and women further along in their careers said it that it was a reality. I want my zine to be a place where people can share their ideas and don’t have to show their credentials to be heard or validated. 

We see across cultures that humans have always had a large connectivity with land and environment. Defense and protection of the environment is synonymous with protection of resources and people. Native American cultures spanning from the southern parts of Chile and Argentina to northern Canada are deeply rooted in the physical land. Practicing culture and community in the age of industrialization and capitalism has become almost impossible. The 2015 “Gendered Impacts series” delves deeper into the connection between land violence and gender violence drawing parallels between the treatment of the environment and the treatment of the women who live there. These communities have been rocked by the intrusion of mining and other industrial facilities that see an “increase of violence against women due to the increase in revenue, that leads to the increase in alcohol and drug abuse, which leads to an increase of domestic violence” this paired with how many “women working at the mine were mainly working as house cleaning staff for a predominantly male workforce and so this did make them very vulnerable to sexual harassment” (KAIROS Canada). So not only have they been displaced from their land, but women in particular face violence on the soil where they were once safe. This displacement has huge community based issues, how do they practice a culture that is environment based when they have lost access to “traditional hunting grounds” and when “important animals have changed their migration routes” (KAIROS Canada)?

This connection between personal identity in land is a concept we talk a lot about in ecofeminism. Looking back on “Touching the Earth” by Bell Hooks and “Knowing Our Place” by Barbara Kingsolver we can see a more intersectional framework connecting nature and identity. Hooks speaks to the similarities between the “Native americans and African people shared with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the Earth” adding that “sharing the reverence for the Earth, [African] and [Native] people helped one another remember that despite the white man’s ways, the land belonged to everyone” (Hooks 364). This binary idea of ownership was something that wasn’t present in Native or African cultures until intervention from colonials. Kingsolver also touches on this idea of abstract ownership and mourns the degradation of naturality in our society saying “With all due respect for the wondrous ways people amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like or that trees breathe out what we breathe in” (Kingsolver 2). This line instantly made me think of the treatment of Indigenous land in the Americas. Kingsolver hits hard on this idea of generational experience and how the experience of the generations will be vastly different especially in cultures that rely heavily on the environment.

-KAIROS Canada. “2015 Gendered Impacts series (4): Land is Identity (2:28).” YouTube, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LopcPrSvDBw. Accessed 2 April 2023.
-KAIROS Canada. “Violence Against The Land (3:02).” YouTube, KAIROS Canada, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlbc2dD0gP0&t=28s. Accessed 2 April 2023.