Feminist Media Production in Europe

Women have always played an important role in movements for social justice. Using media to transport their messages, to disrupt social orders and to spin novel social processes, feminists have long recognized the importance of self-managed media. In the past two decades an increasing number of women have taken the tools of media production into their hands; a vital social phenomenon that has gone largely undetected by members of the public, academia, and even sometimes the feminist movement. As a consequence of this invisibility, very little documentation and research has been done so far on women`s own media cultures, especially so in Europe and with a focus on current developments in the digital realm. To counter this gap and to explore processes, effects, potentials, and limitations of women`s media production in Europe, this study focuses on contemporary feminist grassroots media in the print and digital realm, taking into account not only more traditional media outlets but also present developments in Web 2.0. Building on our previous studies on feminist zines in the German-speaking area, the UK, Sweden and in the international realm, we take independently produced magazines, blogs (web-logs) and e-zines (electronic magazines) as our objects of study. The three main aims of this project are: 1.) to document and describe contemporary feminist grassroots media in Europe, in order to establish a "living history archive", 2.) to analyse the contents and discursive logics of feminist magazines, e-zines and blogs, so as to evaluate the agenda and techniques of feminist media production and 3.) to assess and interpret the meaning, vulnerabilities and significance of feminist grassroots media as producing new and hybrid forms of feminist `communitas.` Archival documentation and analysis, a survey, discourse analysis, and a virtual ethnography with oral history interviewing will provide us with the materials to interpret and contextualise feminist grassroots media production. The contextual background of this study will be drawn from theories of third wave feminism, alternative media, cyberfeminism, poststructuralism, and social change.

Women have always played an important role in movements for social justice. Using media to transport their messages, to disrupt social orders and to spin novel social processes, feminists have long recognized the importance of self-managed media. In the past two decades an increasing number of women have taken the tools of media production into their own hands; a vital social phenomenon. However, little documentation and research has been done so far on womens own media cultures, especially so in Europe and with a focus on current developments in the digital realm. Hence, this project has explored the practices and processes of women-led and feminist alternative print and online media production with a focus on Europe: How does feminist media production in Europe look like today? How do feminist media producers engage in discourses on feminism, challenge the status quo and effect social change by producing print magazines, weblogs and electronic magazines in grassroots, alternative contexts?Alternative on- and offline feminist media were analyzed in relation to scope, stance, agency and action as well as to discourses of feminism. In total, 425 women-led and feminist media projects in Europe (from 34 countries) were found, which were analysed in reference to country, founding year, publishers, publication language, frequency of publication, main content and use of social media. In addition, 47 in-depth interviews with feminist media producers from nineteen European countries were conducted as well as five in-depth case studies and a quantitative online survey. All collected data was documented within the digital archive Grassroots Media in Europe at www.grassrootsfeminism.net, making contemporary cultural practices more accessible to the research community and the general public.Out of our fieldwork a conceptual framework of features of feminist media in Europe was developed. The study confirms previous research on alternative media and feminist media in particular in that they are mostly small-scale, collaboratively produced, heterotopic, based on subcultural literacy, ironic, interventionist and perishable (Lievrouw 2011) and in that they aim to challenge power structures and to transform social roles by producing alternative content and by reverting to a Do-It-Yourself-organized, alternative economy. Taking into account the specific European context we came to identify three discourses on feminism, namely Do-It-Yourself feminism, intersectional perspectives of feminism, and pop feminism in the context of the new feminism debate in the German-speaking context. In sum, the most important contributions of our study to the field of feminist media studies are (a) to provide a comprehensive overview on the diversity, (b) to give a thick description of the practices, processes and discourses, and (c) to offer a conceptual framework on features of feminist media production in Europe, as well as d) to enhance research on alternative, transnational media and the feminist movement today.