Feminist cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian is an social justice activist who has provided media support work (photography, video recording/editing, webdesign) for a variety of movements across the United States and Canada.  In 2007, Anita co-founded the NYC Youth Chapter, a training collaborative dedicated to providing young activists with anti-oppression and media skills. In addition to her workshops on Media Strategy, Organization Building, and Anti-Oppression Skills, Anita recently facilitated youth Public Speaking trainings at the 2008 Fair Use Remix Institute.  In the Spring, she will be teaching a videoblogging workshop with Reel Grrls in Seattle and organizing an afternoon of curated shows about resisting traditional gender and sexuality norms with remix video at California State University, Northridge.

Earning her bachelor’s in Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge, Anita is currently a Master’s candidate in Social and Political Thought at York University. Her research interests are on representations of race, gender, sexuality, class and ability in pop culture as well as fan cultures and online participation.  She is specifically looking at these systems of oppression in television science fiction and fantasy, exploring the evolution and regression of women’s roles and the ways fans have rewritten, reimagined and recreated these roles.

She is always thinking about participatory online communities, how open online culture such as those on youtube and wikipedia amplify and replicate oppressive social norms.  And occasionally she is imagining a vision and strategy for truly participatory, democratic spaces online.

You can see my professional resume on my LinkedIn profile

You can contact me through email at anita [at] feministfrequency.com

About Feminist Frequency

“Popular culture has become our common language, and to become fluent in it is, like it or not, a key part of making sense of the larger world. Popular culture is also a key route to making the concept of feminism — which still manages to send many women and men into a kind of nervous tizzy – both resonant and relatable.” - Andi Zeisler, Feminism and Pop Culture

This is a project I’ve been wanting to do for quite sometime now.  I’m thrilled to see it finally come to life.  Pop culture is such an integral part of how we communicate, relate and understand one another.  Because pop culture is everywhere, it’s important that we are regularly looking critically at the representations we see around us and how they diverge from our visions of a genuinely participatory, feminist, anti-racist society.

Let’s demand more from the media makers! Let’s become our own media makers!

Website Development Details

Software:
My site is powered by WordPress version 2.7, a free and open source blogging platform. The WordPress moto “code is poetry” is fitting as it is by far the best, most flexible and intuitive blogging and content management system (CMS) software out there. Because it’s an open source platform that means the free resources, support forums and extensions are almost infinite.

Theme:
I have so heavily modified this theme that it bares almost no resemblance to the original template which was called Azul 1.1 by Switchroyale.

Plug-ins:
Just ask me if there is anything on the site that you are curious about since it’s a pretty long list.

Coding:
My site follows W3C code standards and validates as XHML 1.0 Transitional and CSS level 2.1 via the W3C markup validation service.

Graphics:
The beautiful header graphic was designed by Justin C. McIntosh.  The social networking icon buttons that appear on my sidebar are from the Social Me icon pack at Iconspedia by Quake9 Designs. The icon set is available for download here and are free to share under a creative commons license.

Hosting:
I used Dreamhost.com to host all my sites, they are a small company, reliable and relatively inexpensive. The world of web hosting is overflowing with unscrupulous companies and in the past I have been burned on several occasions so it’s nice to find a reputable host. They even offer free hosting to non-profit organizations and claim to be a “green company” though its through the dubious process of buying and trading carbon credits which is totally cheating. Anyway I definitely recommended them. If you choose to sign up you can use my promotional code “FEMFREQ123” to get 20% off 1 & 2 year plans – click here.

Licensing:
All the other original and derivative work in the site’s development is filed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Meaning your free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work under the conditions that you give attribution and that it is for mostly non-commercial purposes.  In the past I have also allowed remixing of the work, but given the nature of this work, I do not want my videos remixed and twisted as anti-feminist speech.  Contact me anita [at] feministfrequency.com if you’d like to remix anything on the site to promote and celebrate feminism or to engage in constructive dialogue.

The idea to provide my website details, as well as many parts of the list comes from Rebellious Pixels. Thanks!