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witchwind interviews radfem-ological images.

I had the chance to interview one of the bloggers from Radfem-ological Images shortly after the project ended. Radfem-ological Images presents itself as “a public, radical feminist group blog dedicated to dissecting and discussing media images through a radical feminist lens.” They demonstrated how commercial ads support men’s power over women, and provided a radfem alternative to the boring “this is inequality” liberal critiques of media. They also created ‘the gears’, a very useful breakdown of the different patriarchal workings they identified in media images. I found it interesting that the project ended on a note that questioned the very practice of exposing women to harmful media, even for the sake of criticising it and demonstrating its harms to women. It was also very honest and rigorous to reflect openly about the effects of the work undertaken and what it meant to women. I thought it deserved a…

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January 29, 2013

in Femicide, Necrophilia, Normalize abuse/neglect, Reversal, Women's culture/positive images

Media Exposure as Harmful Cultural Practice

Having worked on this project for nearly a year now, I have come to understand clearly how television and all media imagery functions as political patriarchal propaganda and have tried to demonstrate how this works. I believe this project has been successful in its aims, which were to articulate the facets and mechanisms of the patriarchal propaganda machine (via “The Gears“) and to fill an existing gap in online publishing, where there exists plenty of liberal (non)analysis and no dedicated space for radical feminist analysis of media imagery.

But what does the future hold for a radical feminist media-critical project, once its author realizes that exposure to this propaganda itself, for any reason — even to critique it — is actually a harmful cultural practice that’s best avoided?

December 17, 2012