Recently, 16-year old actor Amandla Stenberg drew both praise and criticism when she called out reality TV star Kylie Jenner for posting a photo of herself to Instagram wearing cornrows. Even though Stenberg was criticized by adults and attacked by many of Jenner’s 29.5 million social media followers, she didn’t back down from her point: If Jenner […]
Technology
Bill Cosby and #TheEmptyChair
On Sunday evening, New York magazine released a devastating story featuring the first-hand accounts from 35 women Bill Cosby has allegedly assaulted. Yet perhaps the most unsetting aspect of the story was not its words, but its cover: the women sitting side-by-side, in stark black and white, feet flat on the ground—and at the end of the line, one empty chair. As New […]
We Heart: Facebook’s New Feminist Icons
You may not have noticed, but there have been a couple visually small—but symbolically huge—changes made to Facebook recently. Caitlin Winner, a design manager at Facebook, was looking through archives of Facebook icons when she noticed something about the “friend request” icon that the rest of us have long overlooked—it depicted two people, a man […]
Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture
Reprinted with permission from Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology. Read the original here. With increasing frequency the ugliness of gamer culture is being put on display for the wider world to see. While I was writing this piece, for example, a Canadian blogger created a game where one can punch and […]
Hacking the Black/White Binary
Reprinted with permission from Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology. Read the original here. We began discussions of this special issue on “Hacking the Black/White Binary,” less than one week after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old, unarmed Black teenager from Florida. The duration of our […]
Rachel Dolezal, Transracialism & What to Learn From Black Allyship Gone Wrong
The past week has been filled with conversations about the now-infamous Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who has successfully passed as Black since around 2006 or 2007. In that time, she has become a known activist, Africana Studies professor, public speaker who specializes in race and gender and the president of the Spokane, Washington chapter […]
We Heart: Marvel’s Badass Microtech Challenge for Girls
According to a report from the American Association of University Women, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women through education and research programs, the United States will need 1.7 million more engineers and computer scientists within the next 10 years. With women and girls still severely underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math, otherwise known as “STEM” […]
Women Soccer Stars (Finally!) Get Virtual Turf
FIFA, or the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, has been making major headlines in the past week. Amid an international corruption scandal, Sepp Blatter was elected to (and then shortly resigned from) his fifth term as FIFA’s president. This Saturday, matches begin in the FIFA Women’s World Cup Canada 2015. And last Thursday, EA Sports […]
Taking On Twitter’s Worst Trolls
Any woman who’s ever been on Twitter knows harassment is de rigueur—and a new study from Women, Action and the Media (WAM!) confirms that once and for all. The study found that women on Twitter are subject to many forms of harassment, including threats of violence and revenge porn, but endure hate speech (sexist, racist and homophobic […]
The Top 10 Ways to Spot a Feminist
At the prompting of a right-wing radio show host, the sexist trolls and meninists of the Twitterverse banded together under the hashtag #HowToSpotAFeminist yesterday, ridiculing women and men who, you know, want an egalitarian society. Trite and unoriginal, the #tcot community collectively chortled over the tired stereotypes that all feminists are ugly, hairy, whiny and can’t […]