Blogs, Politics and Reproductive Justice

By Christine Cupaiuolo — August 9, 2007

There have been a number of conversations online and in listservs recently about gender and blogging in the wake of the annual BlogHer and YearlyKos conferences, both of which took place in Chicago in recent weeks. In a column about the maleness — and whiteness — of the majority of political blogs, Ellen Goodman writes:

It’s not that women are invisible. There are “women’s pages” on the Internet. Technorati counts more than 11,000 “mommy blogs.” There are “women’s issues” blogs.

But this is not just about counting, not just about diversity-by-the-numbers. It’s about the political dialogue – who gets heard and who sets the agenda.

Next year, Yearly Kos will undergo a name change. The assembly of progressive bloggers will call themselves Netroots Nation. But when will the members of these netroots look more like the nation?

Plus: Amie Newman over at RH Reality Check writes that “Reproductive health and rights — whether for women or men — was but a blip on the YearlyKos screen and should have been more conspicuously represented.”

That blip, however, sounds interesting. Aimee Thorne-Thomsen of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project, and a contributor to RH Reality Check, discussed reproductive health during a session about feminist action online and how it is changing the movement. Newman writes:

Aimee defined reproductive justice for the attendees as a combination of social justice and reproductive rights — a movement that is broader than choice, reproductive health or reproductive rights — but one that encompasses all of these issues. Her notion, that if our movement is going to be talking and engaging young women on reproductive health and rights issues we have to know what young women think about these issues, is not exactly radical in theory but in practice it hasn’t been embraced as much as some of us would hope.

Continue reading here.

Comments are closed.