Beyond digital feminism | by Jill Filipovic

On June 16, we released “How US Abortion Politics Distorts Women’s Lives in Conflict Zones,” a detailed report by Jill Filipovic, with photographs by Nichole Sobecki, on how the United States, as a major donor to aid to the world, harm humanitarian groups. ability to provide reproductive health care to women in crisis. US policy essentially prohibits relief agencies from providing abortions, even to survivors of “rape as a weapon of war” – a common practice in armed conflict that has been legally recognized as a form of genocide since the massacres of civilians in Rwanda. and in Bosnia in the 1990s.

The issue has come back to the fore recently with the horrific reports of systematic sexual violence inflicted on women and girls alongside the fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. And Filipovic’s report highlights how US bans on spending federal dollars on abortion spread to refugee camps from Uganda to Bangladesh, where girls and women – pregnant, in fact, d ‘a war crime – are deprived of appropriate reproductive health care. In other words, by exporting its national culture war on the issue, the United States is exercising a form of anti-abortion imperialism.

It seems a grim picture, especially at a time when in the United States, Roe deer v. Wade has faced its most serious legal challenges in decades. But Filipovic also documents the successes some aid agencies, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, and other informal actors, have had in undermining the US ban on medical care including women who have had to flee cruel abuse and dire circumstances. urgently needed.

Filipovic’s article, the result of considerable research and fieldwork, awakened me to a new facet of his work. I have known her writings over the past decade primarily as an opinion contributor and opinion columnist with an overtly feminist voice for The Guardian (where, by way of disclosure, I was its editor in the United States for a while) and for The New York Times. His reporting from an international, even global perspective, was less familiar to me. When we corresponded this week, I asked him about it.

“Women’s rights have always been a primary concern and ultimately women are all over the world,” she said. “Although my work has never been completely US-focused, I no longer need to feel like an expert on everything I write and instead started by asking, ‘What is it about? I want to know more? ‘This question took me beyond the American borders. And she added, “It has broadened my political imagination and extended the scope of my empathy to focus my work on people who do not decide who rules in America, but nonetheless see their lives indelibly shaped by American politics. “

But it also seemed to stray sharply from opinion journalism, previously its signature so much. What is behind this?

Around the same time I started working as a writer, there was a growing demand for more “content” – dead by that! – in a new online world where clicks were a leading metric and posts needed more than a newspaper’s value. every day to meet the demand of readers. It opened a door, and as a writer who was also drawn to advocacy, I walked through it. I love to write opinions and have had the chance to make a career out of it.

It was also a lesson in humility to grow old a little and to understand more and more how little I know and how much there is to learn. I’m in the very lucky position now where my opinion writing work feels enduring enough that I can explore other ways of telling stories – which I can lead with curiosity and follow where it goes. It led me to more focused work where I get to be outside the box, ask questions and try to figure out something important and complicated.

Filipovic’s career trajectory has indeed followed the rise in comments online. Like many of her generation, including renowned writers like Ezra Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Matthew Yglesias, she cut her teeth as a blogger, but Filipovic was a member of a separate cohort of young women.

She joined Lauren Bruce’s Feminist in 2005, as a writer and editor, he started at NYU Law School the same year and continued to blog while working as a litigator. Together with Feminist, founded the previous year by sisters Jessica and Vanessa Valenti, Pandagon, Jezebel, and other like-minded platforms, this constellation of the blogosphere has come to be known as “digital feminism” or “feminist internet”.

Fifteen years later, the closure of Feminist in December 2019 caused a series of elegies sounding the death knell of this era. Even though I had read Filipovic’s own reply to these, I was interested to learn what she considered to be the achievements of the movement.

When I was a young blogger, there were very few feminists on the editorial pages; stories about motherhood and reproductive rights were often relegated to the style section. Feminist bloggers have breathed new life into the feminist movement and reshaped mainstream media: now… almost all mainstream media include articles with a feminist spirit; and reports on issues that disproportionately impact women are stronger, more common, and more precisely categorized.

And its limits?

The few resources that did exist did not always go to the most talented, creative, or efficient people, but often to women who saw the powers that be the most acceptable. It was striking that while ‘digital feminists’ themselves were an incredibly diverse group of women, those who received the most attention and who ended up being snatched up by more powerful institutions were often, but not exclusively, , white, urban women. living and college graduate, including me. I think it’s a movement issue, but it’s not fair a problem of movement is a problem of society.

And there were huge differences in how a very motley team of “digital feminists” viewed their work and the feminist space itself. Is it really possible for one move [feminism] fully and fairly represent the interests of more than half of the world’s population? I am not sure.

I think feminist movements today are in a better position than they were half a century ago, if not ten years ago. They’re still messy and complicated and very imperfect, but I see a lot of progress in the churn rate.