Women, Action & the Media

Last week, WAM!mers on the WAM!list got into a great conversation about our fave feminist books – and now WAM!mer Robin Marty of Care2 has complied them for your summer reading pleasure! (If you want to shop the list, you should click through to her original post, which has links galore.) Please share your own picks in the comments, and happy reading…

General Feminist Non-Fiction:
Backlash: the Undeclared War on American Women – Susan Faludi
The Body Project – Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Catfight! – Leora Tanenbaum
Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists – Courtney Martin and Courtney Sullivan
Englightened Sexism – Susan J. Douglas
Everything You Wanted to Know About Feminist But Were Afraid to Ask – Rachel Fudge (read online here)
The Feminine and The Sacred – Catherine Clemant
The Feminist Promise – Christine Stansell
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics – Bell Hooks
Feminist Theory from Margin to Center – Bell Hooks
Full Frontal Feminism – Jessica Valenti [...]

The excellent blog Queer Marginalia included WAM! in a post today about new strategies for keeping the feminist bookstore spirit alive. Here’s what they had to say about us:

New Words, Cambridge, Massachusetts’ feminist bookstore, opened in 1973 as a partnership of four women. In 2000, they wrote a Ford Foundation grant and received funding to examine whether we still need feminist bookstores. After focus groups and media research, they answered, YES. While this answer may have been predictable (I am no less grateful for it), their innovative projects since then have not been. They created Women Action & the Media, or WAM!, closed the bookstore, and generated an exciting roster of interactive and transnational events focused on increasing women’s media literacy and agency. Their new project, WAM! It Yourself, guides activists to create collaborations in various cities, challenging the single-place of the bookstore model.

The article also brings readers up to date on the new approaches being tried by Bitch Magazine, Women and Children First, Feminist Press, and numerous other crucial feminist literary institutions. Read the whole thing here.

Just ask ‘em…

Join WAM!, the MIT program in women and gender studies, and Chicks Make Flicks for a screening of Louisa May Alcott:  The Woman Behind Little Women, Monday, March 22 at 7 p.m. at MIT.

“Louisa Alcott’s life was no children’s book: she worked as a servant, a seamstress, and a Civil War nurse before becoming a millionaire celebrity writing “moral pap for the young,” as she called it. Under pen names and anonymously, she also wrote stories with enough drugs, sex and crime to prove the author was no “little” woman.”

Need directions or more info on the event? Go here.

Want more info on the film? Go here.

As part of WAM! It Yourself in Boston, the film festival is a chance for Boston filmmakers to showcase their work, connect with each other, and find new audiences, as well as a chance to demonstrate the power of female filmmakers. The festival will be held on Saturday, March 27 at noon; location TBA.

We’re seeking both short and feature-length films in all genres produced by local female and/or transgender filmmakers and students for a one-day film festival. Films from a variety of subjects are welcome.

If you’d like to submit a piece of work, please send a DVD copy of the film along with a short bio, contact information, and whether or not you are available to attend the festival and participate in a short q&a session to: Women, Action and the Media, 7 Temple St, Cambridge MA 02139. Deadline for submissions is March 5. Check out the WAM! It Yourself site for more information about the weekend.

You can now show your support for gender justice in media by becoming a cardholding WAM!Member! When you become a member, you’re not only supporting WAM!, but businesses that support us, all while getting great discounts on products and services.

More than a dozen businesses have partnered with Women, Action & the Media – including Bitch Magzine, Ms. Magazine, and The OpEd Project – and new businesses will be added throughout the year. In addition you’ll receive 10% off your WAM!2011 registration.

Check out the membership page for the full list of businesses and benefits.

Women, Action & the Media has signed onto The Women’s Media Center’s statement, with several other progressive organizations, demanding CBS pull its divisive anti-choice super bowl ad.

It states:  “CBS has a well-documented history of prohibiting advocacy ads it deems controversial, rejecting ads from organizations such as PETA, MoveOn.org, United Church of Christ, and even ones that carry only an “implicit” endorsement for a side in a public debate. Last year, NBC made the prudent decision to not air anti-choice messages during the Super Bowl. CBS executives have indicated in the past that they would not air Super Bowl ads where “substantial elements of the community (are) in opposition to one another.””

Read the full statement here.

We’re not having a centralized WAM! conference this year, because we’re busy launching a whole organization! But that won’t stop WAM!mers from WAM!ing. Instead, we’re putting together an exciting alternative. On the weekend WAM! would have been – March 25-28, 2010, we’re inviting you to host volunteer-run events in cities across the country and the globe, and we’ve just released all the details you need to participate. Click here to read all about it, and then get WAM!ming!

Do you have 10 minutes? Then you can help shape the future of WAM! by taking our survey.

The purpose of the survey is twofold:

1) To get a sense of what WAM! has already accomplished, which will help in making our case to funders, and
2) To find out what’s most important to each of you as we move forward, decide on new program priorities, etc.

Which is to say: it’s pretty important that you participate. You’ve got until Jan. 31. Everyone is encouraged to participate – we want to hear from people who are already part of our core community, from folks who’ve never been involved before in any way, and from everyone inbetween!

Just click here to get started.

Thanks!

UPDATE: We’ve extended the deadline until Feb. 5. But don’t wait – help shape the new WAM! today.

Great news – the Peace Development Fund has agreed to serve as WAM!’s fiscal sponsor while we go through the (sometimes long) process of applying for our own 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. That means that all of your donations to WAM! will qualify for a tax deduction, and it makes it possible for us to approach foundations and other philanthropic institutions for support. Thanks, PDF!