media literacy

Kelsey and I traveled up to Seattle last weekend for two days of geekery at the first-ever Geek Girl Con! We went to panels on women in video games, race and gender in geekdom, women in horror fans, and way more. We were also honored to be on the panel "Media Literacy, Criticism and Production" along with some other really rad women. For this episode of Bitch Radio, here's a good chunk of our panel for you to listen to. Along with me and Kelsey, you'll hear from Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, director of the forthcoming The History of the World as Told by Wonder Woman (we saw clips, it's gonna be amazing!), Anita Sarkeesian, the woman behind Feminist Frequency (you may know her from Mad World and Tropes vs. Women), Leah Wilson, editor of Smart Pop Books, and moderated by Maile Martinez, programming director at Seattle's venerable Reel Grrls! Thanks to everyone who came out to hear us, you were a wonderful audience! Oh, and here's the link to that Strong Female Characters post by s.e. smith I mentioned!

First things first: All of us at Bitch HQ are bursting with excitement because the folks at Oregon Humanities have awarded us a grant to explore the intersections of advertising, feminism, and media literacy. This virtual symposium is called "Mad World: Gender, Advertising, and Identity in a Mediated World" and over the next eight months you’ll be seeing articles, blog posts, podcasts, and even a virtual book club on the website and in the magazine. Get your media-literacy pants on, people, because we’re doing this thing!

On this, the official Mad World blog, we’ll be discussing how advertising informs our identities and our ideas about sex and gender. Got an idea you’d like to discuss? Let us know! The Mad World blog will go up every Tuesday, and we want you to jump in early and often.

Let’s start with a discussion of this ad: This project was made possible in part by a grant from Oregon Humanities (OH), a statewide nonprofit organization and an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds OH's grant program.

Obviously we here at Bitch love us some media criticism. That is why we are so excited to hear about the new IFC television show, "The IFC Media Project." (Well, that and the fact that the show is hosted by super-hunky-dreamboat Gideon Yago.)