Welcome to my blog...

The title of my blog, “The New F-Word,” is a reference to a passage in the book “Manifesta,” by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards. They write:

“Feminism, a word that describes a social justice movement for gender equity and human liberation is often treated as the other F-word. Partly because it’s a word of great power, it’s nearly as unseemly as those other girl terms, cunt or bitch...the term is dripping with qualifiers.”

In a sense, they are saying that feminism, today, is a troubled word. It has too many negative connotations, too much history and too much divided opinion. In order to call yourself a feminist today you must clarify what type of feminist either with a string of adjectives or qualifiers.
In my blog I plan to look at how women are visually constructed in our society in both films and photography – two equally loaded terms in our visual and cultural world. As a woman and a feminist (no qualifiers), I think it is important to look at how the visual mediums we are confronted with on a daily basis influence our thoughts and, conversely, how we influence them. I don’t plan on creating here another angry-feminist (qualifier) rant-blog, but rather a serious conversation on what I am seeing – both positive and negative.

I have been compiling posts for this blog for the past two weeks, but, alas, have been too busy to actually post them, so there will be several initial posts for today.