WAM!

Exciting news! The folks at Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) launched a campaign today to build a grassroots direct-action network dedicated to creating gender justice in media at all levels, including ownership, employment, representation, and access. And they want to do it using movie nights, pitch-ins, social media, letter writing, and anything else we can think of to spread the word. Fun AND necessary—an excellent combo!


To the rescue!

This past March, Women, Action, & the Media held several "WAM!-It-Yourself" satellite conferences in various cities exploring feminism and media. One component of this decentralized conferencing was spreading the conference ideas via the internet. Nist.tv (which I cleverly called "Feminism's YouTube") did a series called "Feminism in Focus: Interviews with Feminist Video Creators," which features interviews with seven awesome feminist filmmakers, including Bitch contributor and Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian! You can watch all the segments online, and there's more content coming! Here's one with filmmaker Tiona McClodden, who talks about her film black/womyn, using social media for social change by posting her movie on National Coming Out Day, how short-form film is great for collaborating with like-minded organizations, exploring representation through filmmaking, and more:

A lot of discussion about WAM! is going on. Some of it's in public blogs, like here, and here, here, here, and here. (I know, that's a lazy way of linking, but I'm tired....) Also here. (OK, I promise I'll stop that.)

A lot of the discussion is also happening over email, and so it's not public.  I've participated in some of this email discussion, but in the interest of being open about my perceptions, I'd like to mention some of the things I've written about in emails…

This was my first WAM! experience, so I have no direct points of comparison. In all honesty, I've outright avoided WAM! up until this year. Here's why...

In the frenzy of preparing for my first Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) conference, I'd arranged a flight that arrived in Boston a day before the conference actually began. Not cool since my hotel room share wasn't starting until tomorrow.

I wasn't too worried because I had a layover in Minneapolis and I managed to convince myself that surely the fine folks at Northwest would let me bump my flight to tomorrow and let me spend a day with my mom.